President insists the bad jobs numbers came from before the election; the calendar reads July.

Here is the President’s argument for firing the lady who counts the jobs. Pay attention, because the argument has a calendar problem and the calendar problem is what we are here for today.

The argument: the BLS rigged the numbers before the election to help my opponent.

The numbers in question: the July 2025 report, which revised May 2025 and June 2025 down sharply. May of this year. June of this year. We are now in August of this year. The election was November of last year.

Buddy. The numbers came out after the election. You won. They cannot have rigged a thing that happened in May, in May, to make you lose in November, in November, of the prior year. Time goes one direction. Even at the casino.

I have run a casino floor. The slot reports go out on a schedule. If somebody asks me whether the count for July was rigged in October of the year before, I am going to ask that person to repeat the question, slowly, and probably to take a sip of water. I am not going to fire the count clerk on the strength of the question.

This is not a small thing. The President is not making a small mistake about the order of months. The President is constructing an entire firing on a sentence whose two halves take place in different years. The press secretary is repeating the sentence. Cable repeats the sentence. By Wednesday the sentence is “true” in the way that anything repeated four times by a man at a podium is true.

But it isn’t. The math doesn’t math. It never matched.

The lady at the count window had a job. She did the job. The job came up short. The President did not like the count.

So he fired the count.

I’m arguing with the television again.