.

So, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revised its report on employment and job growth, reducing the number of jobs created in the reported period (May 2025) from about 129,000 to a mere 19,000. The correction was quite large, but it is not unprecedented. However, since this is well within the chaotic, on-again, off-again tariff merry-go-round of Trump economic activity, a weakening of job growth is bad news for the current administration and the allies that have slavishly lashed themselves to it. I’m given to recall a scene from The Godfather.

Tom Hagen had been sent to Hollywood to bend a studio mogul to Vito Corleone’s will. Acting out of personal pride and stubbornness, the mogul refuses Hagen to his face. Hagen thanks the man for a pleasant evening and meal and excuses himself because Vito Corleone insists on hearing bad news immediately.

This is competent, intelligent leadership. Crises cannot be handled well and the best possible outcomes cannot be obtained if full and accurate information is not at hand for the decision makers. Every two-bit serial villain that kills an underling for delivering bad news is sabotaging their own operation with such shortsighted and idiotic measures.

Trump is idiotic and shortsighted.

He fired the head of the BLS, made wild and unsupported accusations that the bad report was an orchestrated conspiracy to make him look bad, and insisted that the news was, of course, “fake.”

This nation is facing its most critical crisis since the Civil War, and it is only by our actions today and tomorrow that we can save it.