Trump ally insists Americans love job losses: 'Exactly what they elected him to do'
A former Donald Trump adviser downplayed the massive job losses announced Thursday, saying that Americans were getting exactly what they voted for in November.
Job cuts soared 245 percent last month to more than 172,000 – the highest level since the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020 and the highest for February since the Great Recession 16 years ago – and the government made up most of those layoffs, with more than 62,000 job cuts across 17 federal agencies, but former Trump adviser Matt Mowers told CNN that voters must be satisfied.
"You just peel through that report you just talked about," Mowers said, "I think when you actually break it down and you tell the American people that nearly 40 percent of the jobs came from government jobs, taxpayer-funded jobs that are now being eliminated. Most Americans, I understand in Washington, D.C., and some places that are going to be more impacted, that it's going to be a slightly different political calculation. But most Americans across the country are going to say, 'It's about time.'"
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"I mean, look, you've had an ever growth in the expansion of the federal government," Mowers added. "You know, they say it's been the most since 2008. What happened in 2008? Barack Obama gets elected president, oversees one of the largest expansions of the federal government in recent American history. It actually kind of stayed flat under Donald Trump, plus, we then had Covid. You saw an additional expansion under Joe Biden, so of course you're going to see a reduction right now when you're actually finally saying, 'We're going to cut the size of government,' and look, there's been a, you know, unholy alliance between big government and big corporations for a long time. Sometimes corporations are trying to follow where the government is going, they're trying to read the trend, and so that's part of the reason why you're probably going to see a little bit of an outcry, even from corporate America, because they're dependent on big government often, and that's the system that Donald Trump was elected to change."
CNN's Harry Enten had presented polling data in an earlier segment that showed that cuts made by Elon Musk and his U.S. Department of Government Efficiency had just over 50-percent support, and Mowers said that indicated that voters liked what they're seeing so far.
"I mean, you look at the polling that Harry talked about, the American people are with them on this," Mowers said. "As long as the president is out there explaining it, they're going to give him a long leash to do exactly what they elected him to do, which is to turn upside down the system."
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