The Bulwark Podcast
Catherine Rampell and Michael Steinberger: Trump Wants to Cook the Books
17 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What are the implications of Trump's actions on economic statistics?
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Chapter 2: How are job losses affecting the economy under current policies?
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Chapter 3: What role does Palantir play in the government's data handling?
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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We have got a doubleheader today. I told you we'd get serious.
Chapter 4: How is the Trump administration impacting statistical agencies?
I've been wanting to do an episode focused on Palantir for a while now and was happy to have a chance to talk to Mike Steinberger, who's got a new book about Palantir and their CEO, Alex Karp. So we got that in segment two. Also wanted to throw out to you, I got this flag to me. I'm not going to be there. I'm in New Orleans.
I know there will not be actually any Bulwark people there, but Bulwark fans are doing a meetup in St. Paul tonight. The Dual Citizen Brewery in the Twin Cities. So go, if you're listening. Go meet some other people.
Chapter 5: What are the concerns surrounding immigration policies and their effects?
I thought I'd help the industrious Bulwark listeners who are trying to have revelry and have gatherings this holiday season. Encourage anybody else in the Twin Cities to go check it out. But first up... We've got my colleague. She's the economics editor at The Bulwark. She writes the newsletter Receipts, which is published on Thursday evenings. She also co-hosts MS Now's The Weekend Primetime.
It's Catherine Rampell. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, girl?
Chapter 6: How does the economic landscape look with rising tariffs?
Doing well. Doing well. As well as when can in these trying times. That's true.
We're in the holiday season. We don't need to caveat. Things are good. Personally, I mean, you know, the world's. is full of torment always. True.
Chapter 7: What is the relationship between Palantir and surveillance practices?
Maybe it's feeling a little more acute right now. It's certainly feeling a little more acute in the economy. How about that transition? I wanted to talk to you about we had some delayed jobs numbers that came out because of the government shutdown and the fact that the president was considering a scheme to cook the books that isn't going well so far.
And the numbers that we saw yesterday revealed an unemployment rate that's at a four-year high. even though I should say it's pretty low, you know, compared to like past really bad recessions and just otherwise a lot of softness in the economic numbers. What did you see? What caught your eye in particular?
Yeah. So this was, as you said, a delayed report, not,
Chapter 8: How is Alex Karp's perspective on governance and technology evolving?
Everybody's kind of looking around to figure out what's going on in this economy because it is very confusing. Everybody, specifically including the people at the Federal Reserve who have to actually act upon these data beyond the fact that the unemployment rate went up. We now have measures suggesting that in three of the past six months, we actually lost jobs.
We have also lost jobs in manufacturing for the past seven consecutive months. So manufacturing was supposed to experience this big renaissance under Donald Trump. That obviously has not happened. So, yeah, there are some sources of concern. As you point out, the unemployment rate right now is still not high. super high. It's 4.6%.
That may not be super comforting if you are among the 4.6%, obviously. But it's rising. And probably the reason why it's rising, the reason why we've had some job losses, and we can get into whether we should even take those numbers at face value. They're probably overstating the health of the economy.
Part of the reason why all of that's happening is that we have some pretty destructive economic policies that are weighing on the economy.
Let's talk about that because I heard you mention that yesterday with Sam as well, which was that the Fed is looking at this and I guess determining that they think maybe the picture of the actual economy is maybe a little uglier than what even these really weak numbers are showing.
Yeah.
Yeah. So Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week said at his press conference that the Federal Reserve staff think these numbers are probably overstating the number of jobs we're adding each month by about 60,000. So, what does that mean?
That means that if we had last month, as the number showed, about 60,000 jobs added, probably if you adjust it by what they think the error is, maybe we had no jobs added. And in previous months when we had slight job losses, they might have been much bigger job losses. To be clear, this is not an accusation that the Trump administration is cooking the books.
Rather, this is about some difficulties in measurement around the time that an economy might be turning. Because based on the way that the surveys are administered, companies that are closing are no longer responding to surveys. So maybe you're only getting responses from companies that are still doing okay. And so if you were actually to adjust the data a little bit more,
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