What did Donald Trump do today?

He "called for" still yet another economic rescue he has no power to implement.

Last night, for the first time in the history of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment numbers were leaked in advance of this morning's official release. Trump posted a summary to his private microblogging service, apparently in the belief that they were good news. They are not: December's tiny contribution to the 2025 numbers made it the worst year for jobs outside of an outright recession since 2003. 

 

Asked about his leak today, Trump shrugged and said, “I don’t know if they posted them. They gave me some numbers. When people give me things, I post them.”

Notably, Trump's reaction suggests that he doesn't know what is being posted under his name or who might be doing it. And the fact that the White House is launching an internal investigation into who "gave [Trump] some numbers" to mindlessly post suggests there's more to the story, whether or not Trump is in the loop.

There's a reason that BLS jobs numbers are some of the most closely kept secrets in the economic world: they can move markets, and anyone who knows the data or knows when it might be released by surprise can make a lot of (illegal) profit overnight. That sort of free-for-all trading in government secrets for personal enrichment has been a hallmark of Trump's presidency, and especially the second term. Examples range from Elon Musk crowding out competitors to his private companies from government contracts, to someone with insider knowledge of the surprise attack on Venezuela placing huge bets on an invasion at high odds moments before it happened.

Regardless, Trump is clearly rattled by the utter lack of faith Americans have in his stewardship of the economy, and has been desperate to come up with a quick fix. This has mostly taken the form of vague, unfulfilled promises to put money in pockets at some point in the future. He's promised various bribes to lessen the damage caused by his tariffs to individual consumers. Earlier this week he said he'd direct his "agents" to manipulate the real estate finance markets to lower mortgage rates. (This immediately resulted in a huge financial windfall—for mortgage companies.)  He's even tried to pitch the attack on Venezuela as some kind of financial boon to American consumers, even as he's also promised oil companies untold billions in subsidies to re-enter the Venezuelan market, and said he'll personally keep control of any money extracted from Venezuelan oil. (That is also flagrantly illegal.)

Today, he made yet another pledge in that vein: that he would "call for" a 10% cap on credit card interest rates. To put it mildly, that is not a power he has on his own, legally or otherwise, even in the unlikely event he were to actually try to follow through. Congress could pass a law that would do it, and Democrats have already introduced bills to that effect, that Trump has never supported.

There are, or rather were, ways Trump could have intervened on behalf of bank consumers in a way that would actually have helped. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was an Obama-era program enacted by law to help cut down on predatory lending, illegally high rates, improperly imposed fees, and dozens of other types of abuses perpetrated by finance companies. Dismantling the CFPB was one of the highest priorities for DOGE when Trump returned to office, not least because its champion and first director was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whom Trump hates. It was absorbed into DOGE itself and functionally shut down.

In the absence of the CFPB, Trump has been busy undoing its work. For example, he recently sued to overturn a cap it had imposed on credit card late fees. This restores a massive source of real income taken from Americans' pockets for the banks that Trump is now "calling for" interest caps on.
 

Why does this matter?

• Constantly promising things you never deliver on is another way of saying you think Americans are too stupid to notice. 

• A competent president wouldn't have to pretend to rescue Americans from the financial hole he'd dug for them.