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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, what is a very bad leader? What does a bad leader do when they get bad news? Shoot the messenger. That is just what happened with the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Today, we got some of the worst labor numbers that we have gotten in a long time. The economy added only a paltry 73,000 jobs last month. But that wasn't the worst of it. We learned the economy actually added less than 20,000 jobs each in May and June following 2 months of Donald Trump's ``Liberation Day.'' That is 250,000 fewer jobs than we thought.
So, of course, that is very bad news for the economy, but what does Donald Trump do? Instead of trying to fix the economy, he shoots the messenger. The woman he fired, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics passed, this Senate 88 to 8. Vice President Vance voted for her. And now, fire her.
Well, Donald Trump, firing her isn't going to relieve the chaos that you have created with your ramshackle tariff regime. Shooting the messenger isn't going to make the jobs that we are losing in healthcare and clean energy because of your so-called Big Beautiful Bill come back. None of this will change. The American people will still suffer in exactly the same way that they did an hour ago before you fired the head of the BLS.
You know, Donald Trump sometimes admires dictators. He admires them. Well, he sometimes acts just like them. It is classic Donald Trump: When he gets the news he doesn't like, he shoots the messenger.
Now, there is a word for this when the Soviet Union does it, when the dictators of the Russians did it. They called it ``pripiski.'' It meant ``Fire the messenger. Don't change your policies.''
As long as Donald Trump keeps firing messengers who bring him truth-- he hates truth when he doesn't agree with it--as long as he does that, this economy will not improve, inflation and costs to the American people will not go away, and new jobs will not return to this country. He ought to start governing like a leader, not like someone who imitates authoritarian leaders.
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