Wall Street may be on pins and needles about how stocks will react to the jobs report in 18 minutes (as I write this sentence). I’m wondering about a related issue: How exactly will Sarah Huckabee Sanders lie about it when it comes?

Here’s the report now — the U.S. economy added 200,000 jobs in January, as unemployment stayed at 4.1%. Wages rose 2.9% in the last year, up from the 2.5% rate prevailing in recent months, but an uptick in inflation has reclaimed much of that gain through higher gasoline prices. Counting revisions to the last two months’ initial employment estimates, January’s gain was more like 176,000.

The average job gain for Trump’s first 12 months in office is now 176,000 — 15% less than in Barack Obama’s last 12 months in office, marred as it was by the wobbles in Asia that suppressed U.S. exports and drove the dollar higher. Job growth in Trump’s first year was 22% below the average for 2015.

Yet, right on cue, here’s White House Press Secretary Sanders to lie about it on Twitter.

“Lower taxes, higher pay and bonuses, more jobs and opportunity for all,” Sanders tweeted. “Trumponomics is Obamanomics in reverse.”

“ The economy’s doing remarkably well at ignoring the fact that Donald Trump exists. ”

This is the latest in a series of Whoppers Sarah Sanders Tells. Her predecessor Sean Spicer became famous for lying about the numbers of people who took the day off to watch Trump’s inauguration — Sanders lies, constantly, about her boss’s impact on the much larger, wiser crowd of people doing the work that makes the country go.

The debate about Trump lying about the economy, like the argument about Trump lying in general, is an old one. The truth is simple: Economies are built from the bottom up, with moderate influence from politicians, if any.

The economy is doing almost exactly what it was before Trump arrived — it’s the same expansion we’ve had. Its fluctuations since 2014 have been about energy prices and how our trading partners are doing, more than anything else.

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Growth in gross domestic product where it was in 2015. Job growth is lower, real wage growth is lower. Stocks are rising — but less rapidly than in other countries. The simplest way to beat 2017’s U.S. market was to blend bets on America generally with bets on technology, a sector where Trump is a punchline, and on emerging markets.

In fact, if you enjoy snickering at Trump’s conflating stock-market gains with his cheerleading, consider this: The Standard & Poor’s 500 SPX, -1.11% was outperformed last year by S&P’s Shariah index of companies that comply with Islamic law.

Is Trump the patron of shariah too?

In other words, it’s not the economy — it’s the lying that should concern Americans now. Frighten them, actually.

The bloviations of a flack likely to be unemployable once her patron leaves the White House are of a piece with — but pale beside — lies the administration tells about the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that threatens to pack the president’s moving vans.

“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans - something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” Trump tweeted this morning. “Rank & File are great people.”

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Let’s count the lies there. First, the rank and file of the FBI are actually standing with the agency’s management, which told the president it’s unwise (at the least) to declassify information in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’s memo about how law enforcement knew enough about Trump’s buffoonish ex-campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page to get a warrant to wiretap him.

Second, law enforcement is stacked with liberals? Apparently, Trump has never covered a cop beat. FBI Director Chris Wray, special counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — all at risk of being fired by Trump — are Republicans. Plus, let’s not forget how Trump’s b’hoy Rudy Giuliani and Rudy’s muldoons in the FBI’s New York office spent the last weeks of 2016’s campaign leaking about Hillary Clinton.

And there’s the memo itself — an attempt to convince voters Trump can’t be guilty of obstructing justice, money laundering or colluding with Russia because the FBI has Democrats and other meanies.

After weeks of hype, the memo turned out to be a complaint that an application for a warrant didn’t disclose that Christopher Steele, author of the now-famous Trump dossier, had been paid by Democrats. But the memo itself failed to mention that Steele was originally hired at the behest of undisclosed Republicans, and shed literally no light at all on whether Trump is guilty or innocent of anything at all. It was completely consistent, in the end, with Nunes’s history of trying to distract attention from Trump and his team by complaining about investigators.

In other words, all it takes these days to justify what can plausibly be called treason is that it might help the president win a daily news cycle.

Chew on that, when you consider this president’s impact.

One day, two distinct but intertwined lies. Two of the thousands this unprecedentedly mendacious administration tells, which have the same objective — to eliminate the very idea of reality or truth, reducing public discussion to whether one is With the Leader or Against Him. And, if one is against him, to whether those who threaten the leader must be purged.

That matters a lot more than the fact that the economy is trotting along. Indeed, the economy’s doing remarkably well at ignoring the fact that Donald Trump exists.