ASHEBORO, N.C. \u2014 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump introduced a new premise for doubting the election results in advance on Wednesday, turning routine professional revisions of government economic statistics into a baseless allegation of political manipulation.<\/p>\n
Trump portrayed revised job creation numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics released publicly on Wednesday as an accidental disclosure. Without presenting any evidence, he accused the Biden-Harris administration of \u201cmanipulating job statistics\u201d and trying to prevent the disclosure of the updated figures until after the election. The independent agency announced that the economy had created 818,000 fewer jobs between April 2023 and March 2024 \u2014 the biggest revision in federal jobs data since 2009.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s never been any revision like this,\u201d Trump said incorrectly, during a speech here that his campaign intended to focus on national security. \u201cThey wanted it to come out after the election, but somehow it got leaked.\u201d<\/p>\n
The appearance was the latest in a series of swing state events this week that Trump\u2019s aides have billed as policy-centric campaign stops designed to counterprogram the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But Trump has often veered into personal attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, and on Wednesday, he acknowledged that he was having difficulty staying focused on policy issues. He informally polled his crowd here on the matter, drawing more cheers for personal broadsides than for policy criticisms against his opponent.<\/p>\n
The speech was also the first outdoor campaign event Trump has held with bulletproof glass, a change since last month\u2019s attempted assassination on him. It marked the second time in a week that Trump has visited the state, where The Washington Post\u2019s polling average has him leading Harris by one point. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina was Barack Obama in 2008.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s remarks on the new job numbers opened a new front in his consistent attacks on nonpartisan institutions and marked another effort to delegitimize them ahead of the November election. He has leveled other false claims in recent days, suggesting Harris\u2019s nomination was tainted by violence and amounts to a \u201ccoup.\u201d Biden ended his campaign last month and endorsed Harris, an unusual but fully legal and nonviolent process.<\/p>\n
Some conservative and liberal economists reacted to Trump\u2019s comments about the new job numbers by warning that the former president was undermining trust in basic information that policymakers need.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Trump\u2019s attacks on the integrity of the BLS are grossly irresponsible and completely inaccurate,\u201d said Michael Strain, a conservative economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. \u201cThe revisions occur every year, including President Trump\u2019s time in office, and there is nothing remotely scandalous here \u2014 and to imply otherwise is egregious.\u201d<\/p>\n
BLS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The BLS relies on multiple surveys for estimating employment levels in the U.S. economy, and revisions are a normal part of that process. In 2019, during the Trump administration, the BLS revised down its jobs estimate by more than 500,000. These surveys are conducted in different ways and can produce diverging estimates of hundreds of thousands of jobs, given that there are around 160 million workers in the United States.<\/p>\n
The BLS has a tradition of being scrupulously nonpartisan in its dissemination of statistical data to the administration, Congress and the public. Economists, employers and policymakers depend on the agency to produce unbiased information produced free of political interference, much like forecasters everywhere rely on the National Weather Service.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in his remarks, Trump made personal attacks against Harris, suggesting it took some time to find a disparaging nickname for her that would be effective. \u201cI\u2019ve been looking for a name,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While some Republicans have urged Trump to focus on policy-based contrasts, the former president has repeatedly veered into personal onslaughts on Harris in recent weeks, commenting about her appearance and making false claims about her heritage. He mispronounced her first name on Wednesday, a frequent tactic some of her supporters regard as racist and demeaning.<\/p>\n
During his speech, Trump openly acknowledged the strategy debate he is navigating, polling the crowd through their applause levels on whether he should focus on personal attacks or policy, as he complained about Obama\u2019s speech attacking him at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was very nasty last night,\u201d Trump said. \u201cI try and be nice to people, you know, but it\u2019s a little tough when they get personal. \u2018Please again, remember, please sir, don\u2019t get personal, talk about policy.\u2019 Let me ask you about that, we\u2019re going to do a free poll, here are the two questions: Should I get personal, should I not get personal, ready?\u201d<\/p>\n
The crowd cheered after Trump asked: \u201cShould I get personal?\u201d<\/p>\n
He responded, jokingly: \u201cI don\u2019t know, my advisers are fired,\u201d before adding he\u2019d \u201crather keep it on policy but sometimes it\u2019s hard.\u201d Trump recently brought back Corey Lewandowski, his controversial 2016 campaign manager.<\/p>\n
During his speech, the former president excoriated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, noting that Harris was \u201cthe last person in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials who attended meetings with Harris at the time told The Washington Post that Harris raised important questions during the administration\u2019s deliberations about how to proceed but did not push for an alternative policy. Trump also claimed the United States was \u201con the brink of World War III\u201d and bragged that he \u201cstopped wars with phone calls.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump also told the crowd that he would \u201cask for the resignations of every single senior military official who touched the Afghanistan disaster,\u201d a reference to the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the country during the Biden-Harris administration.<\/p>\n
If Trump wins, political appointees in the Biden administration would exit government with or without Trump requesting their resignation. Military officials would stay, but senior generals involved at the time have since retired and recommended to Biden at the time that he not complete a full withdrawal.<\/p>\n
Before Trump took the stage, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), agreed with the crowd that the withdrawal from Afghanistan amounted to \u201ctreason.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was treason, and is it any wonder that Putin then invaded Ukraine on her watch,\u201d Vance said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
When he returned to introduce Trump, Vance said \u201cthey even tried to kill him,\u201d falsely conflating the assassination attempt with political opposition to the former president.<\/p>\n
Trump delivered his remarks in Randolph County, where Trump received 78 percent of the vote in 2020 and 77 percent of the vote in 2016. It\u2019s surrounded on the north and east by Democratic-voting counties with larger cities, including Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Durham and Raleigh and their suburbs, and Charlotte to the southwest.<\/p>\n
LeVine and Stein reported from Washington. Dan Keating and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
ASHEBORO, N.C. \u2014 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump introduced a new premise for doubting the election results in advance on Wednesday, turning routine professional revisions of government economic statistics into a baseless allegation of political manipulation. Trump portrayed revised job creation numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics released publicly on Wednesday as an accidental disclosure. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8292,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}