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Did Donald Trump Just Thank God for a Hurricane Costing Americans Jobs?
At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.
“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”
Trump’s jobs remarks were hardly the worst thing he said this weekend. He labeled journalists covering his rally “monsters,” mocked trans people, and called his opponent a product of political correctness and “stupid,” with a racist and sexist subtext hard to miss. He defended his racist Madison Square Garden rally. On Friday night in Milwaukee he inexplicably expressed frustration with audio issues by pretending to perform fellatio on a microphone stand.
But the reaction to the jobs report was revealing in the gusto with which Trump embraced bad news for Americans as good for him. To be fair, he did describe the numbers as “bad news” during his Friday address. But in North Carolina on Saturday, he celebrated the political benefit he claimed to be getting from the new report—without mentioning the hurricane economists say helped slow hiring by causing catastrophic flooding and hundreds of deaths, including more than 100 in the state he spoke in.
“I mean, how good is that if you happen to be running against the people that did that?” Trump, referring to the jobs report.
This wasn’t the only time he seemed to be rejoicing in doom. Elsewhere in the speech, Trump celebrated, as he generally does at his rallies, an increase in border crossings that followed his exit from office. He has consistently made few bones about his belief that problems at the border are good for him. Early this year, Trump successfully lobbied to jettison a bipartisan bill aimed at toughening security on the Mexican border. Trump’s push was widely understood as an effort to stop Congress from trying to solve a problem that he wanted to use to attack Democrats. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was a key author of the bill, has said that critics of the measures argued: “We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has faulted Trump’s opposition to the measure, calling it evidence that “he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Nothing in Trump’s remarks Saturday refuted that criticism.
Donald Trump Slams Julia Roberts for Narrating Ad Urging Wives to Vote for Kamala Harris: ‘She’s Going to Look Back at That and She’s Going to Cringe’
Trump Threatens to “Get the News Shaped Up”
Donald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him.
“To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning.
During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”
During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” renewing his gripe that the network’s David Muir during a September debate had correctly noted that that FBI data shows violent crime declining, contradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “through the roof.”
Trump isn’t just going after the media with words. On Thursday, the former president sued CBS News for $10 billion, alleging that the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 US Presidential Election.” The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas where the sole judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee known for partisan pro-GOP rulings. Even so, the suit has little chance of success. TV networks routinely edit interviews (including those featuring Trump, who backed out of appearing on “60 Minutes” last month.) My colleague Pema Levy wrote more about this lawsuit and its chances for success here.
Trump’s suit is “without merit” a CBS spokesperson said last week. “The interview was not doctored; and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of the vice president’s answer to the question at issue…60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”
Trump has also said that CBS should lose its license to broadcast news due to the Harris interview. That’s one of many such threats. CNN recently noted that Trump in the last two years has called for every major American TV news network, including Fox News, to be punished for coverage he deemed unfair. Trump has also vowed that if he wins back the White House, he plans to seize greater control of independent regulatory agencies, including the FCC.
The pattern is clear: Trump’s extreme rhetoric is deliberate.
As president, Trump tried to punish media outlets that criticized him. His administration tried to block AT&T acquisition of CNN’s parent company and to deny a cloud computing contract for Amazon, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
Trump has also threatened to jail journalists who report information he contends has national security implications. (Trump himself, of course, has been indicted for illegally retaining highly sensitive national security documents he removed from the White House.) In 2022, NPR recently noted, Trump repeatedly said the prospect of prison rape would cause reporters to disclose sources. “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,'” Trump said at a Texas event.
All these statements amount to an ongoing threat that, if elected, Trump will use his power to curb speech critical of him. That’s a direct challenge to the First Amendment, and hence not likely to fully succeed, even among increasingly partisan judges.
But Trump could still made life difficult for media outlets, and his threats already appear to have had a chilling effect. Amid attacks from Trump and his allies over his philanthropic efforts to help register voters in 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has tried to extract himself from politics, including by limiting what the company deems political content on its platforms. The Washington Post editorial page’s scuttling of an endorsement of Harris has been widely read as an attempt by Bezos to avoid angering Trump, though Bezos disputes that. The Los Angeles Times also drew fire for declining to endorse a candidate this year.
The Post‘s move didn’t appease Trump. The former president ripped the paper during his Fox call-in Saturday, even suggesting the 250,000 lost subscriptions and high-profile resignations the paper suffered due to the non-endorsement was connected to his gripes with the paper. Why is the Post facing these problems? According to Trump, it’s “because they don’t have credibility.”