Research Shows: The 862,000 Lie - How Trump Faked His Job Miracle and Why AfD Voters Should Be Warned

The numbers are on the table. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has counted again. What Donald Trump sold as an economic success turns out to be a statistical illusion. 862,000 fewer jobs than originally reported. Not seasonally adjusted. Seasonally adjusted, the figure is even 898,000. This is not a footnote detail. It is the difference between propaganda and reality.

January 2026, 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. The official press release appears. USDL-26-0169. In black and white it states: the originally reported 584,000 new jobs for 2025 shrink after the annual benchmark revision to 181,000. A reduction of 69 percent. Nearly two thirds of the alleged job growth never existed. The methodology is clear. Every March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics aligns its monthly estimates with the hard data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. These are not surveys. These are unemployment insurance tax records. Every covered job is recorded. The QCEW data reflect reality, not hope.

For March 2025, this means a downward revision of 862,000 jobs. That exceeds the average revision of the past ten years by two and a half times. A deviation of 0.2 percent is normal. 2025 stands at minus 0.5 percent. This is not a statistical cold. It is a systematic miscalculation. The monthly breakdown makes it even clearer. January, June, August, and October 2025 show negative employment growth after the revision. Four months with job losses. Outside of recessions, this last occurred in 2003. 2024 brought 1.46 million new jobs. 2025 comes in at 181,000. The difference is obvious.

Trump took office in January 2025. His first year as president ends statistically with the weakest job increase in two decades. Aside from the pandemic year 2020. The administration celebrated 2025 as a boom. The reality looks different. The federal government is particularly affected. Since October 2024, the federal workforce has been reduced by 327,000 positions. That corresponds to a decline of 10.9 percent. In January 2026 alone, another 34,000 jobs were lost. The background is the severance offers issued in 2025. Employees took the money and left public service. Now they are missing from the statistics.

The financial sector lost 22,000 positions in January. Since May 2025, the total stands at 49,000. Insurance companies cut 11,000 jobs. Other major industries remained stable or stagnated. Mining, oil and gas extraction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail, transportation, logistics, information technology, business services, leisure, hospitality - everywhere stagnation or minimal change. Growth occurred in health care, social services, and construction. Health care added 82,000 jobs in January. Of those, 50,000 were in ambulatory services, 18,000 in hospitals, and 13,000 in nursing facilities. The average monthly growth for 2025 was 33,000. Social services added 42,000, primarily in family and individual services. Construction contributed 33,000, mainly through specialty trade contractors in residential building. Overall employment in construction remained flat in 2025.

The unemployment rate stands at 4.3 percent. That is 7.4 million people without a job. A year ago it was 4.0 percent and 6.9 million. The rate has risen, not fallen. The long term unemployed, 27 weeks or longer without work, number 1.8 million. That is 386,000 more than a year earlier. They account for 25 percent of all unemployed persons. Part time employment for economic reasons fell in January by 453,000 to 4.9 million. Over the year, however, that number has increased by 410,000. These are people who want full time work but cannot find such positions or whose hours have been reduced.

The number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job fell in January by 399,000 to 5.8 million. This group is not counted as unemployed because they did not actively search in the four weeks prior to the survey or were not available. Among them are 1.7 million with a marginal attachment to the labor market. They want to work, have searched in the past year, but not in the last four weeks. A subgroup of these are 475,000 discouraged workers. They believe no job is available for them. Average hourly earnings rose in January by 15 cents to 37.17 dollars per hour. That corresponds to an increase of 0.4 percent from the previous month. Year over year wage growth stands at 3.7 percent. Production and nonsupervisory employees earned an average of 31.95 dollars, also 0.4 percent more. The average workweek was 34.3 hours, a slight increase of 0.1 hours. In manufacturing it was 40.1 hours, overtime remained at 2.9 hours.

November and December 2025 were also revised downward. November lost 15,000 jobs, from originally plus 56,000 to plus 41,000. December lost 2,000, from plus 50,000 to plus 48,000. Together that is 17,000 fewer jobs than initially reported. These revisions result from later reports by businesses and agencies as well as recalculation of seasonal factors. The benchmark also contributed. The unemployment rate for teenagers fell to 13.6 percent. For adult men it stands at 3.8 percent, for women at 4.0 percent. By ethnicity: Whites 3.7 percent, Blacks 7.2 percent, Asians 4.1 percent, Hispanics 4.7 percent. All values remained stable in January. The labor force participation rate stands at 62.5 percent. The employment population ratio is 59.8 percent. Both figures have changed little over the year.

The official labor market statistics recalculated the year 2025 and removed 862,000 jobs. Seasonally adjusted, the correction even amounts to 898,000 positions. Of the originally reported 584,000 new jobs, only 181,000 remain after the benchmark revision.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is based on two surveys. The household survey measures the status of the labor force and unemployment by demographic characteristics. The establishment survey measures employment, hours, and earnings by industry. The technical documentation describes the methodology in detail. What remains is the number. 862,000. That is how many jobs for 2025 were erased from the statistics. The job miracle was not one. The administration sold estimates as achievements. The hard data say otherwise. 181,000 new jobs in one year. In a country with more than 160 million employed persons, that is stagnation. Trump began his second term with the claim that the economy was booming. The official statistics refute that. The benchmark revision is not a political opinion. It is the correction of a miscalculation by facts.

Germany should pay attention. The AfD is building its campaign strategy on Trump’s alleged economic strength. It sells his course as a model for German policy. The numbers from Washington show what that promise is based on: air. 862,000 jobs that never existed. An economic miracle that collapses upon closer inspection. Anyone still praising the American model is consciously ignoring reality. The official statistics are clear. The only question is whether German AfD voters will recognize this in time before they fall for the same promises.