Economist Steven Rattner's Graph Exposes Trump's Job Growth Collapse

What Happened Steven Rattner — investor, MS NOW economic analyst, and former lead adviser to Obama's auto industry task force — posted a graph on X that's making the rounds for a simple reason: it's brutal and easy to understand. The chart compares monthly job creation in the final year of Biden's presidency against Trump's second term so far. The verdict, in Rattner's words: average monthly job creation "fallen dramatically: from 122k/month in 2024 to 33k/month in 2025-26."

The graph doesn't just show a slowdown — it shows the trend line sliding downward the longer Trump's term goes on, with monthly job numbers dipping into negative territory only after he took office. Rattner also flagged a particularly ugly jobs report from last week, calling it "shockingly negative": the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, and previous estimates for May and June got revised down by 103,000 combined.

Why the Graph Hit a Nerve Trump has repeatedly claimed credit for a booming economy and strong jobs picture. Rattner's chart is designed to counter that narrative with a side-by-side comparison that's hard to spin: Biden's final year averaged four times the monthly job creation of Trump's current run. It's the kind of visual that spreads fast on social media precisely because it requires no economics degree to interpret — just eyeballs and a bar chart.

Rattner has been a consistent critic of Trump's economic messaging, frequently pointing out gaps between the administration's talking points and the underlying data. This latest post fits that pattern, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own revision patterns — which showed May and June's numbers were worse than first reported — to argue the labor market is weaker than advertised, not stronger.

What Reader Should Know Jobs numbers are often revised in the months after their initial release, and downward revisions like the ones Rattner cited can signal that the labor market is losing momentum faster than headlines suggest. Whether this becomes a bigger political flashpoint depends on whether the trend continues into the fall, and whether the White House offers its own counter-data. For now, the graph is a snapshot — but it's a snapshot that's landing hard in an economy where wage growth, inflation, and hiring confidence are already top of mind for a lot of households.