As it turns out, it wasn’t the fault of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer that the US economy isn’t adding (m)any jobs. In fact, the agency’s first unemployment report following her firing for daring to deliver bad news to Donald Trump shows that the situation is getting worse.

BLS announced on Friday that the economy added a paltry 22,000 jobs in August and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3 percent, which is the highest level since the end of the COVID pandemic four years ago.

That figure came in way below the already pessimistic estimates of so-called experts, who expected the economy to add 75,000 jobs (although, at this point, it’s difficult to see how anybody could think that even that figure could be achieved).

The bad news for Trump didn’t end there.

BLS also stated that revisions based on more precise data from previous months showed that the economy actually lost jobs in June (while posting slightly higher gains in July than previously reported). Including these new figures, the nonfarm payroll employment increased just over 100,000 over the past four months.

Perhaps the most crushing number for Trump is that the manufacturing sector lost another 12,000 jobs and is down 78,000 for the year.

The president had not only promised a “golden age” for the economy but also a resurgence in manufacturing as his tariffs force companies to build their products in the US.

However, none of this has materialized so far. In fact, the opposite is true.

During the entirety of Joe Biden’s presidency (which was aided by a rebound in employment following the COVID-related shutdown), the economy only added fewer than 80,000 jobs twice. Under the current administration, this has now happened four months in a row.

When looking at it that way, Trump’s promises of turning the Biden economy around have come to bear. The only problem is that it was humming along nicely at the start of the year and is now in the dumps.

In the face of this bad news, administration officials put a different spin on things and are asking Americans for patience.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the “explosive power of [Trump’s] tariff policy” will result in “the greatest growth economy” six months to a year from now.

Of course, when the gross domestic product increased by 3 percent in the second quarter (it has since been revised upwards to 3.3 percent), Lutnick stated that the “Trump economy has officially arrived.”

We fear he may be right, and that these jobs numbers are a mere harbinger of things to come.