commander-in-tweets
Trump tweeted about the jobs numbers before they were released. Here's why it matters.
The Labor Department released its May jobs report Friday morning at 8:30 a.m., but President Trump tweeted about the then-forthcoming data just over an hour before it went public:
On its face, the vague post seems innocent enough, but market watchers suggested the president could have been trying to prime the stock market — or perhaps certain participants — to respond to an unusually positive report.
The jobs data is typically delivered to the White House the day before publication, so it is possible Trump had already seen the numbers before making his post.
When the report did publish, it showed an increase of 223,000 non-farm jobs in May, above the average gain of 191,000 monthly over the last 12 months and the 188,000 new jobs economists predicted for May.