Last Friday (August 1, 2025), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published their latest – Employment Situation Summary – for July 2025. What followed was somewhat extraordinary. The data and the revisions to the previous two months data releases (which is standard practice) showed that the US labour market is in decline. It starkly runs counter to the official Trump narrative that the US is booming. While we don’t have enough evidence to really establish causality – it is likely (based on theoretical conjecture) that the highly volatile policy regime that Trump runs and his tariff flip flops is undermining the confidence in the economy. We need a few more months of data yet before we can be sure. But the BLS results certainly support the view that Trump’s economic policies are not working to advantage the American public. The extraordinary thing was that Trump then sacked the BLS head and signalled a further descent towards totalitarianism.