Confiscating jewellery from survivors of a war zone makes you look like a fucking Nazi. And the obscene thing is, that is the intention. It's there to look appropriately harsh. Indecent. Filthy. A moral stain. And no-one of good character would have ever proposed such a thing in the first place.

A hard part of solving weird issues and then describing them, is that in retrospect you always should've solved it earlier. It was usually obvious with the knowledge you have now. There were numerable junctures you should've made a different choice in.
But GETTING to those junctures ~is the skill~.

My prediction is that in that scenario, he blames the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which puts out employment data. Calls them corrupt, run by Democrats, out to get him. Fires people there, insists their numbers cannot be trusted, White House puts out its own fictitious data to make Trump look good