Give Pete Navarro, President Donald Trump’s economics adviser and ex-con, credit for gumption: He’s seeking to direct public attention away from one of the White House’s least-popular policy initiatives to one that’s performing even worse in opinion polling. During a Tuesday appearance on Fox Business, Navarro cautioned the Trump faithful, “We have to revise expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like.… Wall Street has to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of the job market.”

Navarro’s downbeat appraisal of the job market is familiar news. The Trump administration has averaged an anemic 49,000 increase in jobs per month, well under one-third the rate that Joe Biden’s economy added.

Today’s job numbers, as it happens, came in stronger than expected, with an estimated 130,000 new positions added in January—yet downward adjustments in monthly reports show that virtually no employment growth occurred during 2025. The Trump administration’s already feeble job additions over the year were downgraded to a mere 181,000 positions, while 2024 saw the addition of nearly a million and a half new jobs. What’s more, January’s hiring surge was chiefly powered by hiring in healthcare—a sector in which immigrant labor plays a pivotal role. In other words, Navarro was wrong in both his assessment of hiring trends and in sizing up how mass deportation is affecting them. Meanwhile, the structural malaise of the Trump economy remains unchanged, hampered by Trump’s erratic-at-best tariffs, continued inflation, and sluggish performance in key sectors like housing and manufacturing.

After inaugurating his second term with a vow to create an economic “Golden Age,” Trump has been a Midas in reverse. Over the last year, one economic indicator after another has gone to shit. The United States is now in the weakest jobs economy in a non-recession year since 2003, while the scale of layoffs in January hasn’t been matched since the annus horribilis 2009.

Navarro’s approach to spinning the White House’s dreadful economic performance is to shout, in essence, “Look over there!” But what’s striking is that in trying to change the subject, Navarro is playing up a losing message for the administration. By blaming bad job numbers on the rolling immigration raids, he’s not only underlining the completely unforced nature of the administration’s botched jobs policy; he’s invoking a mass-deportation campaign that Americans dislike and disown. A recent NPR/Marist poll shows that two-thirds of all respondents believe that ICE’s immigration crackdowns have “gone too far”—an 11 percent spike since the raids began last summer. That number actually eclipses the percentage of respondents disapproving of the president’s handling of the economy, which stood at 59 percent in the same poll.

The broader political challenge before Trump’s GOP in a critical midterm cycle is to make it seem like growth and progress are gaining traction in spite of the evidence before voters’ eyes. You could call this the “managing decline” phase of the Trump regime—an all-out effort to persuade Americans that worse is in fact better.

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The zero-sum jobs-immigration tradeoff that Navarro floated is just part of the problem. The day before Navarro’s interview, the White House sent out its own memo to bolster shaky morale among MAGA true believers. “Don’t be a panican,” the headline blared. “We’re winning and we’re not slowing down.” (Pro tip to the Trump messaging shop: To rally sentiment behind you, it’s best not to lead with an awkward portmanteau that no one’s ever heard before.)

The body of the thing is just what you’d expect: rudderless bids to own the libs (“While the Fake News and Radical Left collude to distract, depress, and divide, they’re simply lying to mask the undeniable truth: America is safer, stronger, richer, and more secure than at any point in decades”) combined with flat-out untruths (a lurid laundry list of alleged hardened criminals detained by ICE, when in fact less than 14 percent of the people dragooned into ICE custody have had a violent criminal record, and gang members and terrorists—the so-called worst of the worst—make up just 2 percent of detainees; an absurd claim that there had been “record high crime across the country under Biden’s defund the police era”).

For good measure, the memo includes acrobatic bids to demonstrate measurable progress on the Trump administration’s bullying, hate-mongering agenda. Here’s one sample: “After the Trump Administration surged federal resources into crime-plagued Washington, D.C.”—the fable of a violent and chaotic DC being another agitprop lie—“the District went three weeks into the new year before recording its first homicide—the first time the nation’s capital had gone more than ten days into a new year without a murder in at least three decades.” (The memo might have noted that this was also the longest stretch of homicide-free life in DC while we’ve kidnapped and indicted the first couple of Venezuela, for all the sense its own chosen metric of temporal comparison made.) Under “Everyday Costs Continue Moderating” (a subheading that couldn’t have sounded convincing to even the memo’s authors), we find a citation of a six-month decrease in rents—a sector in which the federal government exercises weak authority. Then, for some reason, there’s this: “PepsiCo announced price cuts of up to 15% on core brands.” (Follow-up pro tip to White House message wizards: When you produce a talking point that is essentially “Let them drink Pepsi,” you’re definitely not winning.)

What makes the administration’s managing-decline messaging so futile is the failure of its apparatchiks to own up to the consequences of their own policy calls. When MAGA toadies like Navarro blame their own lackluster job performance on the ICE deportation complex, they’re effectively assigning blame to senior officials like ICE director Todd Lyons, who just handed in a classic “I don’t know anything about anything” performance in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee. With all arms of the administration serving as alibis for the failure of any one of them, no one is ultimately responsible for anything. Events are clearly building to a point when the Trump White House will revert to January 6 form and find a way to blame everything on Mike Pence.

The other sign that MAGA is sunk in its managing-decline phase is its bid to dictate the basic terms of sports fandom and entertainment viewing in the face of a mass audience fundamentally uninterested in what it has to say on these subjects. When US Olympic skier Hunter Hess voiced ambivalence about representing a repressive and bigoted government in the 2024 Winter Games, Trump laid into him in a raving Truth Social post. Whinging Trump sycophant Florida Senator Rick Scott followed up with an X declaration that all US Olympic athletes criticizing the country should be stripped of team membership, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that the right-wing castigation of “cancel culture” was so much hot air.

Not to be outdone, Texas GOP Representative Mark Alford has announced plans to follow up Trump’s social-media meltdown over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance with a congressional investigation for… reasons. Here’s Alford’s stab at justifying a congressional probe, which somehow makes Scott seem like a statesmanlike defender of First Amendment freedoms by comparison: “We are still investigating this. There’s a lot of information that has come out about the lyrics.… These lyrics, if it is true, what was said on national television, we have a lot of questions for the… entities that broadcast this, and we’ll be talking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this.” In other words, the Trumpified GOP is setting itself up to mount an ongoing attack on a musical performance that earned rave reviews, drew an audience of 135 million viewers in the United States, and even coaxed several MAGA influencers into shows of appreciative fandom. That’s arguably the ultimate form of managing decline: believing you’re mounting a popular and heroic culture-war crusade when you are, in fact, only talking to yourself.