Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.
I'm Franklin Foer in tonight for Jeffrey Goldberg.
President Trump fires the messenger.
The markets plummet.
Nuclear submarines are redirected towards Russia in the debate over the crisis in Gaza rages on here in Washington.
Joining me tonight to help us make sense of it all.
Leeann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck, Andrea Mitchell is the chief Washington and foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News, Alexander Ward is a national security reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and Nancy Yousef is a national security correspondent at The Atlantic.
Leanne, whenever Trump doesn't like an outcome, he describes the process as rigged, and today he fired the head, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because that bureau had defined sorry to find downward the job numbers from the past couple of months.
It sounds pretty grievous.
What are the, what are the implications for the US economy?
Does this risk losing confidence in markets?
Yeah, well, Uh, you know, the job numbers were not as good as the Trump administration wanted, and as you said, that they revised the job numbers down from the last two months as well.
And looking at this woman who was fired.
She was confirmed just last year by the Senate.
There was just 8 senators who voted against her.
She had more than the support of more than 80, 80 senators, and this is a continuation of a pattern of this president when he doesn't like something, when something does not go his way, then he takes Sometimes extreme actions to change it, uh, remember he fired inspectors general at the very beginning of his administration.
He has eviscerated and let go of many career government employees that don't agree with him either, and he's also in addition, he's also eliminating key data in certain agencies about education, environment, climate, so on and so forth.
Uh, and so yes, this is another move that could would undermine people's trust in the data and the, the information that the government puts out.
And in fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the gold standard, uh, from one administration to another.
They've always been nonpartisan and they always revise either upward or downward when they get the final data because the monthly data and the quarterly data are preliminary, so for them to do this, it was actually previewed by Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary very early on when he said maybe we'll just change the way we, you know, calculate these things.
And it has enormous implications for the markets here and global markets if they can no longer trust the data coming out of the United States.
Andrea, I just want to stay with you and talk about another thing that Trump was very busy this afternoon on social media and in addition to firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
He repositioned Russian nuclear submarines in response to a social media post from former Russian President Dmitry.
would have.
That sounds pretty scary.
Well, it sounds scarier than it probably is.
First of all, he didn't say whether he was repositioning nuclear powered submarines or submarines that carry nuclear-tipped missiles.
We have obviously both in our fleet.
One is in the triad in the nuclear triad, the nuclear missile bearing submarines, their positions are always, you know, top secret.
And we don't know where he's repositioning them if they were nuclear powered submarines, they may have already been in the relevant regions and to suggest this in response to a threat from Medvedev, who is sort of an attack dog for the Kremlin, but has no power.
He's not only the former president, and he was only a a seat warmer for the return of Vladimir Putin.
He's now the deputy counsel chairman or something from one of the committees in, you know, in the Duma.
So he's not a powerful person, and To do that when he's really angry at Putin, but it is the first time he's made a nuclear threat of any sort against Russia.
He had in his first term, said that his nuclear button was bigger than Kim Jong Un's.
It may be the first time a president has ever made a nuclear threat in response to a social media post.
Exactly, and you know Vladimir Putin had made nuclear threats and saber rattled in the early months of the Ukraine war, but the intelligence assessment was um I was told this.
you know, personally, from the IC, the intelligence community, was that that was not a serious threat, and there was no repositioning of US forces in response.