Donald Trump ‘s friend-turned-foe Chris Christie says the president is constantly looking for a scapegoat ‘like a petulant child.’ This, the former New Jersey governor claims, is why Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a non-flattering jobs report last week. Trump slammed McEntarfer, an appointee of President Joe Biden, in a Friday Truth Social post claiming she ‘manipulated’ figures to fit a political agenda and called for her ouster.

It came after the BLS monthly jobs report for July came out and showed it yielding a below-expectations-number of just 73,000 jobs. Trump says it is ‘fake’ and went on a social media tirade against McEntarfer and the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for not bowing to his pressure to lower rates. ‘When [Trump] gets news he doesn’t like, he needs someone to blame because he won’t take the responsibility himself,’ Christie told CNN on Sunday. ‘And this is the action of a petulant child. Like, you give me bad news, I fire the messenger.’

Other Republicans and Trump allies are not happy that the president’s ire was taken out on McEntarfer. Republican Sen. Cyndia Lummis of Wyoming said if the numbers are accurate and she was still fired: ‘That’s a problem.’ ‘These are turbulent times and we’ve created some of the turbulence, and so it should be expected that there would be some ups-and-downs associated with job market,’ Lummis admitted to reporters on Capitol Hill. North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Trump and those who decided to fire McEntarfer ‘ought to grow up.’

Trump-appointed BLS Commissioner William Beach said it’s not the fault of the commissioner if jobs are initially reported incorrectly, and on X he called her firing ‘groundless.’ ‘The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers until Wednesday before they’re published,’ Beach told CNN on Sunday. ‘By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared.’ In a post on Sunday, Trump accused McEntarfer of intentionally over-reporting job growth before the 2024 presidential election. He claimed that McEntarfer overstated job growth by 818,000 for the year ending March 2024 and by 112,000 in August and September of last year.

The president insists the more positive reporting was done intentionally to boost Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances of winning in the 2024 election. It’s standard procedure for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to issue revisions due to lags and complexities of gathering job numbers reports from more than 600,000 businesses. The adjustments are made to reflect more accurate figures once they are available. Former officials, including Beach, have stated revisions are routine and not an inherent indication of manipulation.

‘These were records — No one can be that wrong?’ Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday. ‘We need accurate jobs numbers.’ ‘She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,’ he continued. But Beach warned that Trump has ‘undermined credibility’ and that no one he appoints to lead BLS will be trusted. ‘Suppose that they get a new commissioner and this person, male or female, are just the best people possible. 

And they do a bad number. Well, everybody’s going to think, well, it’s not as bad as it probably really is because they’re going to suspect political influence,’ Beach explained. U.S. hiring growth dropped dramatically last month and unemployment ticked up, the latest jobs report released on Friday showed. Non-farm payrolls added 73,000 in July, more than 25 percent lower than the 100,000 expected by analysts. The unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.2 percent. The report also sharply revised down the figures for May and June by a combined 258,000 jobs from the previously released figures.

Following the revision June’s total was left at just 14,000 and May’s at 19,000 — effectively flat. Analysts say July’s figure is also likely to be revised lower, possibly into negative territory. The latest figures suggest cracks are in fact starting to show up in the economy, despite a slew of previous better-than-expected economic data released recently. It comes after the Federal Reserve once again held rates steady at its July meeting on Wednesday.

The weaker figures could incentivize the Fed to lower interest rates at its next meeting in September, something Trump has been pleading for during most of his second term. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has consistently declined to heed Trump’s calls as he continues to monitor possible inflation from tariffs. ‘Higher tariffs have begun to show through more clearly to prices of some goods, but their overall effects on economic activity and inflation remain to be seen,’ Powell told reporters, noting that inflation could be short-lived or more persistent.

According to her LinkedIn bio, McEntarfer previously served as an economist at the Census Bureau and at the Treasury Department, as well as working as a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisors for a year during the Biden administration. Her bio statement is a dry statement filled with economics lingo. ‘My research is focused on labor market dynamics and interactions between firms and workers in the economy and has been published in the Journal of Labor Economics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives,’ she writes. ‘I have spent over 20 years as a professional economist working on issues related to economic measurement and innovations in workforce data,’ she states.