Former President Donald Trump is holding a rally on Saturday afternoon in Mosinee, Wisconsin, one day after U.S. stocks tumbled following an August jobs report that fell short of economists’ expectations.
The S&P 500 together with the Dow recorded their most significant weekly decline since March 2023. Similarly, the Nasdaq experienced its largest weekly drop since January 2022.
Data from the U.S. Labor Department revealed a less-than-expected performance in the jobs sector in August, with only 142,000 jobs added versus analysts’ forecasts.
Trump, the GOP’s presidential nominee, is scheduled to begin his remarks around 2 p.m. ET at the Central Wisconsin Airport. The rally can be streamed on the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) website or RSBN’s YouTube page.
The former president is running slightly behind Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in Wisconsin, a key swing state in this year’s election. With the economy a top concern for most voters, Trump is likely to pounce on Friday’s headlines about the economy and stock markets.
The recent economic reports left the market guessing about whether the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates by 25 basis points or 50 basis points at a meeting in September, Subadra Rajappa, head of U.S. rates strategy at Societe Generale, told Bloomberg in an article that published Friday.
Adding to the economic uncertainty was a series of revisions to past data that wiped out previously reported job growth. Last month’s revision to March data erased over 800,000 jobs.
Republicans are trying to pin economic anxiety on Harris who as vice president, they say, was a key player in President Joe Biden‘s policy making and his economic agenda that Harris and Biden embraced as “Bidenomics.”
Newsweek has emailed Trump’s and Harris’ campaign for comment on Saturday morning.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on August 17. Trump is holding a rally on Saturday afternoon in Mosinee, Wisconsin, one day after U.S. stocks tumbled following an August jobs report that fell short of economists’ expectations.
AFP/Getty Images
The Friday jobs report also contained some useful details for Trump’s Saturday speech. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the manufacturing sector last 24,000 jobs in August, a stat that will resonate across the industrial Midwest where swing states such as Wisconsin decided the last two presidential elections.
The Labor Department report also showed employment among U.S.-born workers falling by about 1 million jobs and employment for immigrants rising by almost the same amount compared with the data from August 2023.
Conservative media seized on this data as more evidence that the immigration policies of the Biden-Harris administration were hurting Americans. Illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border is also a top concern for voters who say they trust Trump more than Harris to tackle the issue.
In Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 26-year-old Alejandro Jose Coronel Zarate, of Venezuela, was detained Thursday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), following allegations of sexually assaulting a young female.
According to Kyle Teynor, the chief of the Prairie du Chien Police Department, Zarate is thought to be affiliated with “Tren de Aragua,” a notorious Venezuelan gang. Teynor relayed this in a press release posted Friday on the department’s Facebook page.
The mentioned gang has recently generated public outcry and media attention when a video of its members at an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado, surfaced. Two apartment buildings in Aurora, housing immigrants and other residents became the center of attention last week when the clip, showing armed men searching apartments, went viral. The Aurora Police Department has issued multiple updates in the past week, saying it arrested six suspected Tren de Aragua members and increased law enforcement presence around the apartment complexes.
Zarate, meanwhile, was booked into jail for domestic disorderly conduct, two counts of domestic battery, strangulation/suffocation, physical abuse to a child, disorderly conduct and two counts of second-degree sexual assault. Zarate also had warrants through Dane County, Wisconsin, for strangulation/suffocation, false imprisonment, battery and disorderly conduct.
“This incident highlights the need to be aware of the dangers that affiliates of these transnational criminal organizations pose to our communities. Violence towards others, no matter the circumstances, cannot be tolerated in our community. Our agency remains committed to holding violent actors accountable for their criminal offences,” Teynor wrote on Facebook.
Prairie du Chien is approximately 200 miles south of Mosinee where Trump will speak today.
