President Donald Trump traveled to West Virginia on Thursday for a tax round table in Greenbrier county where the president attacked Democratic incumbents, spoke about the number of illegal immigrants voting during the 2016 election and revealed that the military would build “some” of Trump’s planned border wall.
But the surprise was that in the wake of today’s unexpectedly soft weekly jobless claims number, which printed at 242K on expectations of a 225K print, Trump took a few moments to talk up tomorrow’s jobs report, telling the crowd “we’re gonna come out with numbers on Friday that are hopefully gonna be fantastic numbers.”
Trump sets expectations on tomorrow’s jobs report: “We’re gonna come out with numbers on Friday that are hopefully gonna be fantastic numbers.”
— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) April 5, 2018
Of course, Trump has a long history of talking (and tweeting) about economic data that much of the public was probably ignorant of before he took office. And considering that the market has endured some turbulence this week as tit-for-tat trade tensions between China and the US continued to percolate, it’s not surprising that he’d want to try and reassure them.
However, somebody should probably tell the president that a strong jobs number and higher-than-expected wage inflation is precisely what the markets don’t want: after all, we saw what happened when we got such a combo back in February, which supplanted the “goldilocks” paradigm, unleashing a historic VIX surge and market plunge. Bottom line: if Trump really wants stocks higher, he wants the most “unfantastic” number possible as that would suggest the Fed might delay the pace of interest-rate hikes.
Unless, of course, Trump already knew what the payrolls number is and was so excited to leak it, that this was the outcome.
Trump then quickly moved on to other topics. At one point, the president held up what he said was a copy of his prepared remarks, and threw it away, pronouncing it “boring. “
“This was gonna be my remarks. It would have taken about 2 minutes,” he said, before tossing the paper in the air. That would have been a little boring. Little boring,” he said. “I am reading off the first paragraph and, I said, ‘This is boring.'”
Then as he often does during his regional visits, Trump dedicated some time to attacking Manchin, who Trump said “votes against everything,” including “our tax cuts.”
Trump also said that the military might be involved in building the wall during an extended riff about immigration.
“We have to have strong borders,” the President said. “We are going to have the wall. We’ve already started building it. We have a billion six. We are building it and fixing miles and miles of wall that’s already up and fence. We’re going to have our wall, we’re going to get it very strongly, the military is going to be building some of it, but we’re going to have very strong borders and we have to change our laws and we’re working on doing that.”
He later reiterated his claim that “millions and millions” of people illegally voted during the 2016 race.
“In many places the same person in California votes many times,” said Trump, at the official White House event in West Virginia on tax cuts. “They always like to say, ‘Oh that’s a conspiracy theory.’ It’s not a conspiracy theory. Millions and millions of people and it’s very hard because the state guards their records.”
In keeping with the theme of the event, Trump tweeted that his tax cut plan had helped make America “open for business.”
Thanks to our historic TAX CUTS, America is open for business, and millions of American workers are seeing more take-home pay through higher wages, salaries and bonuses! pic.twitter.com/0u3dpLJiV2
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 5, 2018
Circling back to the jobs report, expect a congratulatory tweet from the president if the data comes in strong, as most expect, especially after the blowout ADP. And if the data is weak, well we are confident Trump will find something else with which to distract.
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