Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, on Saturday.Chris Carlson/AP
At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.
“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”
“He’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”
Trump’s jobs remarks were hardly the worst thing he said this weekend. He labeled journalists covering his rally “monsters,” mocked trans people, and called his opponent a product of political correctness and “stupid,” with a racist and sexist subtext hard to miss. He defended his racist Madison Square Garden rally. On Friday night in Milwaukee he inexplicably expressed frustration with audio issues by pretending to perform fellatio on a microphone stand.
But the reaction to the jobs report was revealing in the gusto with which Trump embraced bad news for Americans as good for him. To be fair, he did describe the numbers as “bad news” during his Friday address. But in North Carolina on Saturday, he celebrated the political benefit he claimed to be getting from the new report—without mentioning the hurricane economists say helped slow hiring by causing catastrophic flooding and hundreds of deaths, including more than 100 in the state he spoke in.
“I mean, how good is that if you happen to be running against the people that did that?” Trump, referring to the jobs report.
This wasn’t the only time he seemed to be rejoicing in doom. Elsewhere in the speech, Trump celebrated, as he generally does at his rallies, an increase in border crossings that followed his exit from office. He has consistently made few bones about his belief that problems at the border are good for him. Early this year, Trump successfully lobbied to jettison a bipartisan bill aimed at toughening security on the Mexican border. Trump’s push was widely understood as an effort to stop Congress from trying to solve a problem that he wanted to use to attack Democrats. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was a key author of the bill, has said that critics of the measures argued: “We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has faulted Trump’s opposition to the measure, calling it evidence that “he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Nothing in Trump’s remarks Saturday refuted that criticism.
