Well, damn. Those villainous anti-Trump, deep-state elves at the Bureau of Labor Statistics are at it again, spewing fake news and phony numbers. The Washington Post — wouldn't you just know it? — gullibly reports them:
The momentum in the U.S. labor market flagged in March, new government data showed Friday, with the private sector and the government adding only 98,000 jobs, [down from 219,000 in February and] the lowest gain in nearly a decade…. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected 175,000 jobs to be added in the month.
Last month, when the job numbers were (supposedly) good, Trump's spokesman, Sean Spicer, quoted him as saying that "They may have been phony in the past, but they are very real now." Ah but the elves were just toying with Trump. The devious little bastards were only setting him up for a fall. Once a villainous deep-state elf, always a villainous deep-state elf.
And that's the way the Trump-Putin governing philosophy works: sap the public's confidence in official facts — facts, that is, that emanate from anywhere but the authoritarian top.