As the White House elaborated in a news release at the time: “President Trump has delivered on his promise to reignite the American economy and usher in a new economic boom.” Job growth was “smashing expectations.”

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Those who follow the Labor Department’s monthly jobs reports — as I have now for more than a decade — know they are extremely noisy. That is, they bounce around a ton from month to month, and the margin of error in the payroll jobs number is plus or minus about 115,000. So, way above-trend numbers for one month could be the start of a new “miracle” boom, but they are more likely to be an aberration that could quickly reverse itself. Which is why hailing one month of unusually strong growth (or alternatively, mourning one month of unusually weak growth) is always risky.

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The Obama administration knew this. In fact, if you look back at news releases from President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, you’ll see their analyses of the latest jobs numbers always ended with this disclaimer:

As the Administration stresses every month, the monthly employment and unemployment figures can be volatile, and payroll employment estimates can be subject to substantial revision. Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data as they become available. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/12/02/employment-situation-november

That administration used similarly cautionary language in news releases about quarterly gross domestic product growth reports. They did this regardless of whether the latest numbers were good or bad.

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This administration, of course, has no qualms about touting noisy, possibly anomalous numbers when they show good news. And what happens when the data — somewhat inconveniently — show bad news?

They change the subject.

That’s what happened Friday, after the Labor Department released its jobs report for February.

The headline number coming out of the February jobs report looks bad. Really bad. Economists had been forecasting that about 175,000 jobs were added on net; instead, we got only 20,000.

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To be clear, this does not necessarily mean a recession is imminent. Sure, maybe the economy is stumbling; some other recent economic reports have also been disappointing. But unseasonably bad weather might have been to blame for these ultra-low jobs numbers. And as I said, the data also just bounces around a ton from month to month. Perhaps an unusually low reading in February merely offset an unusually high reading in January, the one that was hailed as evidence of Trump’s “economic miracle.”

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Faced with this news, the White House released an analysis emphasizing February wage growth. (Which in nominal terms was good, but what we actually care about is what it looks like in inflation-adjusted terms, which we don’t have yet.) What about that lackluster headline 20,000 payroll jobs number? Funnily enough, the White House suggested the public shouldn’t worry, because it was merely one month and the year-long average was still good.

Which is surprising, given that Larry Kudlow, who is now director of Trump’s National Economic Council, had no qualms about declaring a recession was already in the offing when we got a similarly lousy one-off jobs report in May 2016, back when Barack Obama was president. The initial estimate for that jobs report was 38,000; it was subsequently revised further downward, but despite Kudlow’s fearmongering, it did turn out to be a random, anomalous month. Job growth in May 2016 was low, but for the year overall job growth averaged close to 200,000.

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In any case, this is hardly the only time that Trump or his advisers have been inconsistent about celebrating seemingly good (or bad) economic readings that could quickly turn.

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When they get one quarter of above-trend, over-4-percent GDP growth, they boldly proclaim it the start of a new era . . . despite the fact that similarly strong one-off quarters of strong GDP growth also took place during Obama’s tenure and indicated no such thing. Actually it will be interesting to see how the Trump administration tries to spin the GDP number for the first quarter of 2019 if it comes in as predicted: Right now the forecast is in the 1 to 1.5 percent range.

And, of course, Trump loves to brag about the stock market . . . when it’s up. Which is dumb not only because presidents don’t control stock markets, and not only because the market did better under Obama, but also because what goes up can come down. And markets have periodically taken big plunges during Trump’s presidency, though he seems to have a short memory about such episodes.

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Perhaps it’s too much to ask for consistency from this White House on what measures we should use to gauge Trump’s economic success, given that they offer consistency on so few other fronts. But if they’re not going to be consistent about when they amplify or extrapolate from eye-popping economic data, they could at least stay out of the discussion altogether.