When Donald Trump was running for president, he regularly accused the government of putting out “phony” economic data, declaring that the jobs numbers were nowhere near as good as the Bureau of Labor Statistics claimed, and that the “true” unemployment rate was probably more like 42 percent. (Yes, he literally attempted to suggest that nearly half the country was looking for work.) Naturally, once he became president, that tune about the government faking official data changed faster than you can say “DADDY, GIVE ME MY TOP SECURITY CLEARANCE!”, and he was more than happy to believe, brag about, and take credit for the numbers the Labor Department reported, including the ones that came out when he had barely been on the job for a month. (An actual quote: “[The numbers] may have been phony in the past, but [they are] very real now.”) But it seems Friday brought about a return to form, with the president’s administration arbitrarily deciding that the news that a mere 20,000 jobs were created in February cannot be trusted:

That’s White House National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, who has a long history of being wrong about everything, telling his old colleagues at CNBC that no one should pay any attention whatsoever to the shocking 20k figure, down just slightly from the 180,000 jobs that had been predicted. Of course these things get revised all the time, and it is entirely possible that February’s number will be much higher when everything shakes out. But even economists who agree we shouldn’t put much stock in the 20,000 metric say it shouldn’t be completely ignored:

Elsewhere in Kudlow stats, the former Reaganite claimed during his CNBC interview that “despite this silly, fluky number, we are on a roll and I am going to say that the outlook for the American economy is still 3 percent-plus,” a prediction he is alone in making:

Kudlow’s optimistic forecast is an outlier. Private-sector economists think economic growth will slow to 2.5% annual growth this year, according to the National Association for Business Economics. Many Federal Reserve officials have said they expect growth closer to a 2% rate this year.

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