The jobs numbers were bad — so Trump fired the messenger

What happened? On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which is part of the Labor Department, released its latest employment numbers, and the news wasn’t good for the US economy.

The US added 73,000 jobs in July, which was well below the 100,000 jobs economists had expected. But, even worse, the previously released jobs reports from May and June were revised dramatically downward. It turns out that, in those two months combined, the US added 258,000 fewer jobs than the BLS had initially thought.