Trump’s demolition of the American job market continues. Last week’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a stunning loss of 23,000 jobs in July:
If there’s one thing an economy’s supposed to do, it’s add jobs. At least enough to absorb folks joining and re-joining the workforce — from school, raising kids, and (at least in former times) immigration.
So a -23,000 month, like the U.S. economy had in July, is definitely going in the wrong direction. In fact, over the past three months, with those big downward revisions, job creation has averaged just 20,000 a month, which is pretty anemic.
Diving deeper into these signs of mediocrity, July saw job losses in several sectors: local government down 57,000, leisure and hospitality down 40,000, finance down 14,000, retail down more than 19,000.
The sector that lost the most jobs in July was local government education. That category is mostly K-12 public school roles, which were down almost 50,000 [Mitchell Hartman, “Here’s Where the Economy Lost Jobs in July,” Marketplace, 2026.08.07].
Trumpflation fouled the jobs boost we should have gotten from the World Cup:
Nationwide Chief Economist Kathy Bostjancic… pointed to another sector that lost jobs in both June and July: leisure and hospitality.
“The surprising part there is that it happened during the World Cup, right? Ticket sales were strong, attendance, tourism,” she said.
Andrew Flowers at recruitment technology firm Appcast said he sees one reason that both leisure and hospitality, and retail shed jobs in July: “Those are very consumer-facing industries. Inflation is now outpacing wage gains, so households are starting to pull back on spending” [Hartman, 2026.08.07].
Friday’s report revised the much-vaunted May and June jobs tallies down sharply:
Figures for May were revised to 63,000 jobs added, down from an initially reported 129,000 jobs, while figures for June dropped 37,000, to 20,000 jobs added. In total, job figures for May and June were revised down 103,000 jobs [Michael Sainato and Gaya Gupta, “US Unexpectedly Lost 23,000 Jobs in July as Slump in Growth Continues,” The Guardian, 2026.08.07].
Also sandbagging the job market: Trump’s anti-immigration mania:
With immigration having largely been stopped — and possibly now a net negative — the labor force is growing very slowly. At the moment, there is little danger that job growth will fall below the breakeven pace needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising. However, slower wage growth, even in the face of rising inflation, indicates it is not a very good labor market for most workers. That story does not seem likely to change any time soon [Dean Baker, “July 2026 Jobs Preview: What to Expect,” Center for Economic and Policy Research: Data Bytes, 2026.08.05].
Inflation rising, wage growth slowing, workforce stagnating—that’s Trumponomics!
Feeling great again yet?