I am not breaking news to anyone by pointing out that Donald Trump consistently disparages information that he thinks makes him look bad. Meanwhile, any data that he thinks casts him in a positive light is inevitably the greatest, the best, the most accurate data imaginable.
Given that persistent inflation has been a chief national concern, it’s no surprise that Trump has taken aim at members of the Federal Reserve’s governing board for the grave crime of recognizing that inflation has remained stubbornly above the Fed’s 2% target during the first year of Trump’s second term. It is impossible to dredge up every inane insult and inaccurate accusation. It’s probably enough to recollect that Trump is trying to fire Lisa Cook from the Fed Board of Governors for made-up nonsense while he is simultaneously, in an apparent attempt to win gold at the irony Olympics, threatening Fed Chair Jerome Powell with indictment for planning building renovations that are too fancy.
When it comes to the nation’s monthly jobs report, Trump’s astounding hyperbole dates all the way back to his first term. Suffice it to say, “the numbers are great” is among the tamest comments he’s made about the job market while he’s been in office, always regardless of the reality on the ground.
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Trump purged the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2025, purportedly because they made too many large revisions of employment data, but the real message was clear: put out data that Trump likes or lose your job as a BLS bean counter. There were great fears at the time that Trump’s attacks on the people who produce, interpret, and act upon this nation’s economic data would lead to untrustworthy information coming from official government sources.
Republicans claim to like to let the market decide. Just a month and a half into 2026, it seems the market has officially come out with its verdict: the numbers produced by Trump’s BLS are dogsh*t.
On February 11, the BLS released its January jobs report. According to this report, nonfarm payrolls surged by 130,000 last month. This was more than double economists’ consensus estimate of 55,000 positions. Unemployment also reportedly ticked down.
Faced with such stellar employment numbers, one might expect the stock market to have had a strong day. Yet, the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq composite all ended slightly lower at the close of trading on February 11.
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Later last week, on Friday, the BLS announced that annual inflation had cooled to 2.4% for January, down from the previous reading of 2.7% and below economists’ expectations. Once again, rather than reacting positively to what seemed to be unequivocally good economic news, stocks were largely unmoved. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones each eked out a 0.1% gain for the day, while the Nasdaq fell by 0.2%. Overall, it was the worst week so far of 2026 for the stock market.
The stock market is incredibly complex, and any claim tying its performance (or lack thereof) to a specific news event should be viewed with healthy skepticism. That being said, last week was relatively calm in terms of the Trump administration excreting other potentially market-moving outrages, so it’s possible to view these employment and inflation numbers in a little more isolation. Furthermore, inflation and employment are two of the key economic concerns of this era that supposedly led to Trump’s election in the first place. If traders actually believed the numbers that just came out of this BLS, showing a much better employment situation and lower inflation than economists predicted, the stock market would not have had its worst week of the year.
Trump meddled with the BLS, and it appears to have had his intended result: rosier-looking economic numbers. But the market hasn’t been fooled. Stock traders appear to now be acting more on real data that they can verify and less on Trump-induced lies. Hopefully the corporate media soon learns to follow suit.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].