New York (CNN Business)President Donald Trump is heading into the general election with the worst jobs numbers of any president, based on records that go back to World War II.

That's not going to change in the two months between now and Election Day, no matter how the economy does.

The US economy is down 4.7 million jobs since January 2017 when Trump took office, according to the Labor Department.

The August jobs report released Friday showed employers added back about 1.4 million jobs, bringing the unemployment rate to 8.4%. That is still well short of what would be needed to give Trump a positive jobs record by November 3.

Her Republican colleagues had, up until then, been civil. But one day in late July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol while Representative Ted Yoho lost his shit. The Florida Republican, incensed by the New York congresswoman’s recent comments linking crime and poverty, jabbed his finger in her face, calling her “crazy” and “disgusting.” She froze. The situation felt dangerous, with Yoho towering over Ocasio-Cortez, who calls herself “five-five on a good day.” Congressman Roger Williams, a Texas Republican, bumbled next to him like a wind puppet at a used-car dealership. She told Yoho he was being rude and went into the Capitol to vote. As Yoho descended the steps, he called her a “fucking bitch.” A reporter nearby witnessed the exchange, and soon the whole world had heard the epithet.

This part hasn’t been reported: The next day Ocasio-Cortez approached Yoho and told him, “You do that to me again, I won’t be so nice next time.” She felt his actions had violated a boundary, stepping “into the zone of harassment, discrimination.” His mocking response, straight out of Veep: “Oh, boo-hoo.” Publicly, Yoho doubled down, issuing a non-apology on the House floor, citing his wife and daughters as character witnesses.

Ocasio-Cortez flashed back to one of her first jobs out of school, when a male colleague whom she’d edged out for a promotion called her a bitch in front of the staff. She had been too stunned to reply, and no one came to her defense. She wouldn’t let it happen again.

Forty-eight hours later, Ocasio-Cortez delivered one of the most eloquent dunks in political history, a “thank u, next” for the C-SPAN set, taking on not just Yoho but the patriarchy itself. She took care to enter “fucking bitch” into the Congressional Record. “I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women,” she told the House. “It happens every day in this country.” And the line that spawned headlines, T-shirts, hashtags, and memes: “I am someone’s daughter too.”

As the economy slowly tries to recover during the coronavirus pandemic, new data shows that women are still being disproportionately impacted by today's crisis.

Between August and September, nearly 1.1 million workers ages 20 and over dropped out of the labor force, meaning they are no longer working or looking for work. Of those workers, 865,000 of them were women, a number that is four times higher than the 216,000 men who also left the workforce, according to a National Women's Law Center analysis.

"This is the devastating impact of the ongoing breakdown of our nation's caregiving infrastructure in the face of Covid-19," Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at NWLC, tells CNBC Make It. "As families across the country struggle to figure out how to keep their jobs while also making sure their children are cared for, safe and learning every day, it's women who are being pushed out of work."

While all women are undoubtedly feeling the brunt of today's pandemic, Martin adds that Black women and Latinas are still seeing the highest rates of unemployment, "demonstrating the ways Covid-19 is deepening the already sharp inequities in our economy."

As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake.

The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.

Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before – 9,647 cases, up from 8,069 to 9,647 cases.

Public health officials additionally have linked 16 cases, including two hospitalizations, with the rally in Beltrami County, Minnesota, and one case with the rally in Marathon County, Wisconsin. Outside of the counties identified by USA TODAY with a greater case increase after rallies, officials identified four cases linked to Trump rallies.

Heading into the November election, the US jobs recovery is running out of steam.

The economy added 661,000 jobs in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. The unemployment rate stood at 7.9%.

This is the highest the unemployment rate has been ahead of a presidential election since the government started tracking the monthly rate in 1948.

In 2012, when the country re-elected President Barack Obama, the pre-election unemployment rate was initially also reported at 7.9%, before getting revised down to 7.8%.

In early 2017, Alex Gibney flew to a secret location on the West Coast to meet a man named Glenn Simpson. Just a few weeks prior, Simpson, a co-founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, had become known the world over for his role in producing the so-called Steele Dossier, which alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to secure Trump’s 2016 presidential victory (among far more salacious activities). Simpson told Gibney he was concerned that if anything were to happen to him, then his side of the story might never get out. Gibney, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker who had already been looking into Russia, was eager to hear it. Just a few months later, Fusion GPS’s findings would form the basis of the Mueller investigation.

Over the past 40 years, Gibney has built a reputation for unpacking some of the biggest scandals of our time: Enron, WikiLeaks, Lance Armstrong’s blood doping, Elliot Spitzer’s liaisons. If anyone could explain the Russia-Trump story in a way that others would understand, it would be him. And so after their meeting, Gibney set to work on Agents of Chaos, a two-part series that premiered on HBO in late September. The story it tells may not answer any unresolved questions, but it brings together a cast of characters who have never before appeared in the same story, including former FBI director Andrew McCabe, former Trump associates Felix Sater and Carter Page, and, of course, Glenn Simpson himself. Collectively, they provide chilling insight into the lengths to which Russia went to sow chaos in the U.S. in 2016, and the extent to which the Trump campaign was willing to help. More chilling still: While the series may be finished, the story is far from over.

In a telephone interview before the series premiered, Gibney told me that he thinks part of the problem with the way the Russia-Trump story has been told up to now is that “everybody wanted to tie it up neat.” His team decided to take a different tack altogether, to “embrace the very idea of uncertainty. And once you embrace that idea, then tying up every loose end ends up kind of missing the essence of the story.” The essence of this story, as Gibney tells it, is that the Russian government wanted to dismantle American democracy, and so they did, by the most convenient means at their disposal: us.

It’s a far messier story than the myriad conspiracy theories that have attempted to explain the events of 2016, like the idea that Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s or the QAnon notion this is all part of a plot by deep state Democrats to frame Trump lest he unmask their cabal of pedophiles. And that’s exactly Gibney’s point. “Conspiracy theories, at their heart, are a way of explaining the unexplainable,” he told me. “Everything fits together perfectly. Well, things don’t fit together perfectly, usually.”