← Videos · Foreign Policy & Defense

Trump Gaggles with Press Before Departing the White House, Aug. 1, 2025

August 1, 2025 · The White House · 0:09:20

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump took questions from the press before departing the White House on August 1, 2025, carried on the White House channel. Asked why he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he said: “because I think her numbers were wrong. Just like I thought her numbers were wrong before the election” — recounting that the pre-election figures were followed, as he put it, by a reduction of “eight or 900,000” after the election. “She made a mistake,” he said, rejecting that account.

On foreign policy, the President confirmed the submarine move: a threat “was made by a former president of Russia and we’re going to protect our people… I do that on the basis of safety for our people.” He noted a Federal Reserve governor’s resignation announced that day, said Brazil’s President Lula “can talk to me anytime he wants” while maintaining the people running Brazil “did the wrong thing,” and reported that he had spoken with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff after his Gaza meetings, whose primary subject was “getting the people fed.” On India, he said he understood India would no longer buy Russian oil — “I don’t know if that’s right or not, but that’s a good step.”

Why it matters

This departure gaggle is the President’s own first explanation of two of that week’s largest actions — the BLS firing and the submarine deployment — given on the South Lawn the day both were fresh, and the baseline against which the August 3 confirmation and the August 7 numbers presentation are read.

Scoreboard watch

This gaggle is a scoreboard reference point: the President’s August 1, 2025 stated rationale for the BLS firing (jobs figures wrong before and after the election, as he characterized them) and his account of the India–Russian oil report, each as stated by the President, to be checked against the published data and the trade record.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Gaggles with Press Before Departing the White House, Aug. 1, 2025” (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by the President.