President Donald Trump has been hit with a disastrous jobs report to kick off the new year.
Employers added 50,000 jobs last month, coming in below economists’ expectations, according to figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The most damning data to emerge Friday was a revision to October’s already-poor job figures, revealing that the economy shed 68,000 more jobs than previously reported, bringing the total to a staggering 173,000 non-farm jobs lost.
Even analysts on Fox Business conceded those figures are not what the president wanted.
Maria Bartiromo, a Trump-friendly host, bluntly reacted to the figures: “The jobs numbers are weaker than expected.”
The Dow Jones’ estimate for December was that the economy would add 73,000 jobs. Figures for October and November 2025 were each revised downward from initial reports, so December may eventually face a similar fate.
Data from the BLS show that President Joe Biden oversaw significantly more job growth in his final full year in office than in the first 11-and-a-half months of MAGA 2.0. The economy added an average of 168,000 jobs per month in 2024, compared with 49,000 per month in 2025.
A payroll gain of 584,000 for 2025 makes it the worst year outside of a recession since 2003, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, Heather Long, told CNBC. She said the Trump economy is boosting the wealthy, but not the working class.
“It’s fair to say that 2025 was a hiring recession in the United States,” she said. “The United States is experiencing a jobless boom where growth is strong, but hiring is not. It’s a great scenario for Wall Street, but an uneasy feeling on Main Street.”
The underperforming report comes as Trump weighs whom he will nominate as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. He told The New York Times that he has already made a decision, but stopped short of naming his pick.
Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, is rumored to be the favorite. Asked if Hasset was his pick, Trump told the Times, “I don’t want to say,” but described him as “certainly one of the people that I like.”
Trump, 79, is known to follow the advice of the last person who spoke to him, so it is impossible to know who he will ultimately choose. Hassett has largely been a MAGA mouthpiece, but he has occasionally criticized the president’s economic plans.
Hassett, 63, has a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where Trump attended business school. He said in December that Trump’s wish to roll out $2,000-a-person tariff refunds to Americans “is a mess” and “would be very complicated,” but has otherwise worked as a “Trump Propagandist,” reports The Atlantic.
