ASHEBORO, N.C. — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump introduced a new premise for doubting the election results in advance on Wednesday, turning routine professional revisions of government economic statistics into a baseless allegation of political manipulation.
Trump portrayed revised job creation numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics released publicly on Wednesday as an accidental disclosure. Without presenting any evidence, he accused the Biden-Harris administration of “manipulating job statistics” and trying to prevent the disclosure of the updated figures until after the election. The independent agency announced that the economy had created 818,000 fewer jobs between April 2023 and March 2024 — the biggest revision in federal jobs data since 2009.
“There’s never been any revision like this,” Trump said incorrectly, during a speech here that his campaign intended to focus on national security. “They wanted it to come out after the election, but somehow it got leaked.”
The appearance was the latest in a series of swing state events this week that Trump’s aides have billed as policy-centric campaign stops designed to counterprogram the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But Trump has often veered into personal attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, and on Wednesday, he acknowledged that he was having difficulty staying focused on policy issues. He informally polled his crowd here on the matter, drawing more cheers for personal broadsides than for policy criticisms against his opponent.
The speech was also the first outdoor campaign event Trump has held with bulletproof glass, a change since last month’s attempted assassination on him. It marked the second time in a week that Trump has visited the state, where The Washington Post’s polling average has him leading Harris by one point. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina was Barack Obama in 2008.
Trump’s remarks on the new job numbers opened a new front in his consistent attacks on nonpartisan institutions and marked another effort to delegitimize them ahead of the November election. He has leveled other false claims in recent days, suggesting Harris’s nomination was tainted by violence and amounts to a “coup.” Biden ended his campaign last month and endorsed Harris, an unusual but fully legal and nonviolent process.
Some conservative and liberal economists reacted to Trump’s comments about the new job numbers by warning that the former president was undermining trust in basic information that policymakers need.
“President Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the BLS are grossly irresponsible and completely inaccurate,” said Michael Strain, a conservative economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “The revisions occur every year, including President Trump’s time in office, and there is nothing remotely scandalous here — and to imply otherwise is egregious.”
BLS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The BLS relies on multiple surveys for estimating employment levels in the U.S. economy, and revisions are a normal part of that process. In 2019, during the Trump administration, the BLS revised down its jobs estimate by more than 500,000. These surveys are conducted in different ways and can produce diverging estimates of hundreds of thousands of jobs, given that there are around 160 million workers in the United States.
The BLS has a tradition of being scrupulously nonpartisan in its dissemination of statistical data to the administration, Congress and the public. Economists, employers and policymakers depend on the agency to produce unbiased information produced free of political interference, much like forecasters everywhere rely on the National Weather Service.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Trump made personal attacks against Harris, suggesting it took some time to find a disparaging nickname for her that would be effective. “I’ve been looking for a name,” he said.
While some Republicans have urged Trump to focus on policy-based contrasts, the former president has repeatedly veered into personal onslaughts on Harris in recent weeks, commenting about her appearance and making false claims about her heritage. He mispronounced her first name on Wednesday, a frequent tactic some of her supporters regard as racist and demeaning.
During his speech, Trump openly acknowledged the strategy debate he is navigating, polling the crowd through their applause levels on whether he should focus on personal attacks or policy, as he complained about Obama’s speech attacking him at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday.
“He was very nasty last night,” Trump said. “I try and be nice to people, you know, but it’s a little tough when they get personal. ‘Please again, remember, please sir, don’t get personal, talk about policy.’ Let me ask you about that, we’re going to do a free poll, here are the two questions: Should I get personal, should I not get personal, ready?”
The crowd cheered after Trump asked: “Should I get personal?”
He responded, jokingly: “I don’t know, my advisers are fired,” before adding he’d “rather keep it on policy but sometimes it’s hard.” Trump recently brought back Corey Lewandowski, his controversial 2016 campaign manager.
During his speech, the former president excoriated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, noting that Harris was “the last person in the room.”
Officials who attended meetings with Harris at the time told The Washington Post that Harris raised important questions during the administration’s deliberations about how to proceed but did not push for an alternative policy. Trump also claimed the United States was “on the brink of World War III” and bragged that he “stopped wars with phone calls.”
Trump also told the crowd that he would “ask for the resignations of every single senior military official who touched the Afghanistan disaster,” a reference to the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the country during the Biden-Harris administration.
If Trump wins, political appointees in the Biden administration would exit government with or without Trump requesting their resignation. Military officials would stay, but senior generals involved at the time have since retired and recommended to Biden at the time that he not complete a full withdrawal.
Before Trump took the stage, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), agreed with the crowd that the withdrawal from Afghanistan amounted to “treason.”
“It was treason, and is it any wonder that Putin then invaded Ukraine on her watch,” Vance said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When he returned to introduce Trump, Vance said “they even tried to kill him,” falsely conflating the assassination attempt with political opposition to the former president.
Trump delivered his remarks in Randolph County, where Trump received 78 percent of the vote in 2020 and 77 percent of the vote in 2016. It’s surrounded on the north and east by Democratic-voting counties with larger cities, including Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Durham and Raleigh and their suburbs, and Charlotte to the southwest.
LeVine and Stein reported from Washington. Dan Keating and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.