The Chatterbox-in-Chief Blows Yet Another Secret

Who is this man talking to?Pete Marovich/CNP via ZUMA

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Once a month the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases new job numbers. The report is always released at 8:30 am, just like many other BLS releases, and before then it’s treated as extremely confidential, just like every other BLS release. How confidential? There are people who have built multi-million-dollar communications networks to get BLS numbers from DC to Chicago a few microseconds before anyone else. That’s how confidential.

A day ahead of time the numbers are shared with the Council of Economic Advisers, who often show them to a few members of the White House staff—including the president, of course. This is done so that the administration can be prepared to talk about them intelligently after they’re made public. Before then, everyone is very tight-lipped about things.

Until now. An hour before the May report was released, President Trump posted a tweet:

As Jason Furman notes, Trump wasn’t “looking forward” to seeing the employment numbers. He’d already seen them. He just wanted to telegraph that they were pretty good:

In a mere three hours this has already been discussed to death, and I don’t have any unique insights to add. It’s pretty obvious why this is bad. It’s bad to telegraph a confidential report ahead of time. It’s bad to make people wonder if the lack of a tweet in the future means the numbers are bad. And it’s obvious to wonder if maybe Trump chatted with a few of his favorite friends about this during his copious executive time last night.

It’s equally obvious, I suppose, that Republicans will all rally around and insist that this is no big deal. And why not? They’ve already made it clear that as long as Trump gives them lots of conservative judges to confirm, they’ll defend anything he does. So this will disappear down the he-said-she-said rathole and a month from now we’ll all be glued to our Twitter feeds around 4:30 am to see if the president is going to give us a hint about the June employment numbers.

In the meantime, this has put Trump front and center, and that’s all that really matters to him. What a feckless cretin.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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