SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And for more on the possible deployment of troops, we're joined by NPR's Ron Elving. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: What is your judgment as to whether President Trump will send the National Guard to Chicago and other places?
ELVING: He says he will. But as we have seen with tariffs, this president will set a policy by decree or threaten to do so, then reverse himself a short while later. And let's remember that the federal court in California has said he exceeded his authority by intervening with troops in Los Angeles this summer. Now, the National Guard deployment here in Washington is also in court, but Trump likes to keep his options open. He may want to wait to see what else happens in the days ahead - next week, the week after, which stories are dominating the news? Will they be stories he wants, or will he want to direct attention elsewhere? Like you, Scott, I grew up in that city, Chicago. I know something of its crime history, what it costs people who live there. But does that current situation there or in Washington, is it anything like what we saw in LA last summer or in the Rodney King riots there in 1992?
SIMON: There were disappointing job figures yesterday. U.S. employers added just 22,000 jobs in the month of August. What should we make of this?
ELVING: It was a reality check, and in more ways than one. Trump has said the economy is doing great. These numbers say we may need some policy changes to avoid a recession. So just how bad was this report? Well, Trump went on social media to dismiss it and then changed the subject to talking about the Epstein files, which is usually his least favorite subject, and which was back this week in the news with the spotlight shifting to the victims. But on the jobs report, it is now clear that the weak jobs report a month ago was not an anomaly, nor the work of a labor official who had been appointed by another president.
Trump fired that official. Yet this new report was way worse, not just in the number of new jobs created or the jobless rate going up, but in the index of actual hours worked - perhaps the purest measure of labor output. Of course, the silver lining on this cloud was the pressure on the Federal Reserve Board that Trump wants to lower interest rates. But that now seems almost certain to happen this month, and still, a silver lining on a cloud does not dispel the cloud itself.
SIMON: And President Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense. Here's how we explained the decision.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So we won the first world war. We won the second world war. We won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense. So we're going Department of War.
SIMON: Ron, what do you make of the name change? What could it signal?
ELVING: I think many will see this as just another roadside distraction and maybe it is purely cosmetic, but it also has a more troubling side. It seems to signal that the president, the commander in chief, wants to go on the offensive. He says out loud, we've been too defensive in Ukraine, and he makes it known he won't hesitate to blast a boat in open waters if he thinks it's carrying dangerous narcotics from Venezuela. Well, that happened this week, too.
SIMON: And on Friday, the president posted on social media that India and Russia seem to have been lost to, quote, "deepest, darkest China," as he put it. This coming after their leaders held, obviously, high-profile talks with China's president. What do you make of how we should view this moment?
ELVING: Deepest, darkest China. Deepest, darkest China. Oh, my. There does seem to be a lot going on in this particular social media post. But what was going on with this three-way celebration of these countries - a new global order in the making? It's a widely shared opinion that the U.S. has pushed India away with Trump's tariff policies, and it's anyone's guess where Trump stands from day to day with either President Putin or President Xi. And if these three nuclear powers, including the world's two most populous nations, are forming some kind of a bond and offering something together to other nations around the world, that is troubling. And it makes you wonder how much of it is attributable to willful disengagement by the U.S., the country that once aspired to world leadership.
SIMON: NPR's senior contributor, Ron Elving. Thanks so much for being with us, Ron.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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