White House rejoices over strong jobs report.
The White House celebrated a stronger-than-expected jobs report on Friday, insisting that the uptick in hiring shows that the U.S. economy remains strong even as the war with Iran continues to elevate oil and gas prices.
The report, which showed that employers added 172,000 jobs in May, doubled as a political win for President Trump, who has struggled for months to tamp down voters’ mounting economic anxieties. It offers him a new talking point as he races to shore up support for his flagging agenda, months before voters head to the ballot box for the midterm elections.
But the strong hiring, which greatly outpaced analyst expectations, came with an important caveat. The growth in the labor market — on top of uncomfortably high inflation recently — seemed to reduce the chances that the Federal Reserve would lower interest rates any time soon.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for those steep cuts. Weeks ago, he celebrated the swearing in of his new chair of the central bank, Kevin M. Warsh, with the hopes that he might soon achieve them. And yet, the current trajectory of the economy made it less likely than ever that the Fed would slash rates. Markets now expect the next move to be a rate increase, possibly in 2027.
“This is about the strongest market of my lifetime,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said of the labor gains during an appearance Friday on CNBC.
Mr. Hassett chalked up the “enormous amount of positive momentum in hiring” to the president’s policies, including the tax cuts he enacted last year. That, he said, should spur growth, but not in a way that would compel the Fed to raise rates.
“It’s a supply-side driven job market boom, which I think means the Fed can watch the inflation numbers and wait awhile before it does anything about it,” he said.
Since the start of the war, Mr. Trump and his top aides have tried to downplay the economic consequences. The president has dismissed the fallout or described it as only temporary, and in some instances, he has suggested that he expected it to be far worse — causing the stock market to plummet while pushing oil and gas prices much higher.
The price of a gallon of gasoline reached $4.22 nationally on Friday, according to AAA, down from its peak during the war but still significantly elevated from a year earlier. That has further weighed on American families, majorities of whom increasingly tell pollsters they are frustrated with the nation’s economic trajectory. Among the strains, workers’ earnings have not kept pace with the growth in prices, a gap that affected lower-income families the most.
“President Trump’s failing economic agenda is shrinking families’ paychecks,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement Friday. “Instead of fixing the economic pain he’s caused, Trump is doubling down on his reckless tariffs and his war in Iran.”
Yet Mr. Trump has remained bullish in spite of those numbers. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, he repeated his belief that the debate around affordability was a “con job,” while boasting that the stock market is setting records under his watch.
“There is clear momentum in the American economy as a result of President Trump’s proven economic agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and energy abundance that’s unleashing the private sector,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, wrote on social media.
