The horrendous September jobs numbers — only 29,000 new jobs (a fraction of the 84,000 expected) and unemployment up to 4.2% — tell only part of the story. With downward revisions, the economy actually lost 10,000 jobs in July and added just 133,000, not 162,000, in August (as Donald Trump touted in his rant-filled encounter with TIME magazine last week). Coupled with inflation, the soaring debt, and spiking energy prices, the Trump economy has become a nightmare for ordinary workers and consumers.
These rotten jobs numbers, the last monthly jobs report before the election, will prove difficult for all but the most indoctrinated MAGA cultists to spin. The New York Times reported, “Yes, it’s a hard time to be looking for a job — the average unemployed worker has been looking for a job for nearly six months.” But even people with jobs are struggling given the “weakness in wage growth.”
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For millions of workers, salaries have not kept up with inflation, and with mortgage prices now streaking past 7.3 percent, dreams of purchasing a home any time soon have evaporated for many Americans. Heather Long, a former economics reporter and now chief economist of the Navy Federal Credit Union, explained, “The financial pain is real: Wage growth fell to 3% (y/y) in September. That’s the lowest in 5 years.” With wage growth at 3 percent but inflation at 3.4 percent, “Inflation has eaten up all wage gains for the average worker since April. Many people are having to make hard choices about what to buy and what to skimp on right now.” Though consumption is still sustained by richer Americans, “a lot of people have to think hard about every dollar they spend,” she explained. “Notable: Wages only ticked up 0.1% in the month of September. That was the weakest monthly gain since December 2025.”
No wonder Trump’s economy approval numbers are cratering. The latest AP-NORC poll reported:
Sixty-five percent of adults overall say higher-than-usual prices are the result of Trump’s policies, while 67% of Republicans say higher prices are due to factors beyond the president’s control….
Trump is also falling short of expectations on the cost of living, with 69% of the public saying his handling of the issue has been worse than expected, including 52% of Republicans.
More than half of adults say the country as a whole, the national economy, and their local economy are worse off since Trump was reelected in 2025. Forty-six percent say they and their families are worse off since the start of Trump’s second administration. Most Americans (73%) say the country is heading in the wrong direction, including 92% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans.
This is no outlier. In the most recent Quinnipiac poll, Trump’s approval on the economy is at an all-time low (31 percent). Likewise, Fox’s September pollshowed “nearly two-thirds of voters (63%) say the Trump administration has made the economy worse, including a quarter of Republicans.”
Democrats were quick to underscore the lousy job numbers. As Yahoo Finance reported: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts calculated that Trump’s economy has added an average of 33,000 jobs a month since Inauguration Day in 2025 — ‘far below the 120,000-a-month average in 2024’ of the last year of former President Joe Biden’s time in office…. Like other Democrats, Warren also zeroed in on weak wage growth, writing that ‘since the start of Trump’s war [in Iran], real wages have fallen.’” Former Biden official Gbenga Ajilore added that “in the broader context, lower wage growth is a warning sign given the administration’s harmful policies.”
The regime’s utter contempt for voters’ economic woes (Vice President JD Vance lectures them to stop worrying about “little things”) leads Trump and his flunkies to make ever-more cringeworthy comments that, if anything, will only infuriate voters. After the miserable September report, Kevin Hassett, the National Economic Council director, when asked if he was disappointed in the jobs report, told Fox Business, “No, not even a little bit.” Well, for now, he has a job.
Trump makes even more appalling gaffes in instructing Americans not to believe their lived experiences. Last week en route to Texas, he declared, “I give us an A+ on the government, on economics, on everything.” Voters struggling to decide whether to pay medical or grocery bills will recoil at that grade inflation. Likewise, Trump’s insistence that energy costs are “worth” his unpopular, disastrous war is of little consolation to those paying sky-high prices for regular gas and all-time high prices for diesel.
With Trump’s poll numbers so dismal and his self-congratulatory pronouncements so jarring, Democrats are no doubt delighted that Trump has announced he is heading out to campaign for Republicans, although his focus on already-safe red areas means the amount of damage he can inflict on his fellow Republicans may be less than we hope for. (A Republican president going to Alabama, for a shockingly sparse crowd, this close to the election, as Trump did on Friday, should be a flashing siren that things are terribly amiss for his party.)
Indeed, a flock of vulnerable Senate Republicans wants nothing to do with Trump. The Hill reported on an anonymous Republican senator warning it was a mistake for Trump “to campaign in Midwestern states where higher costs caused by the Iran war and Trump’s tariff policies are fueling voter anger.” That senator confessed, “We need our voters to turn out, but the ones that are making the decision, really, are those independent voters. And right now, they’re not looking favorably at President Trump.”
As Democrats make their final pitches to voters, they will no doubt emphasize that House and Senate Republicans are wholly responsible for Trump’s inane tariffs, Iran war, huge deficits, chaos-generation (e.g. ICE wreaking havoc with local economies, incompetent financial advisers spooking the markets), and self-indulgent graft (building monuments to himself while ordinary voters cannot pay the bills). They could have taken back tariff authority. They could have cut off authorization and funding for the war. They could have reined in ICE to, among other things, protect hard-hit industries rocked by loss of workers (e.g. construction, agriculture, hospitality, tourism). They could have refused to confirm unfit Cabinet secretaries and a weak Federal Reserve chairman. And, most of all, they could have rejected the Big, Ugly bill which took away SNAP benefits and healthcare coverage, doled out trillions to the ultra-rich, and sent the deficit soaring.
Republicans did none of those things, and now they will have to face the voters with an economy that cannot be blamed on anyone but them and their addled president. And if they now dread Trump coming to their district/state or appearing in ads paid for by the taxpayers (another egregious affront), that’s simply political karma.