President Trump can finally say his administration has added 1 million jobs, thanks to a jobs report released by the Department of Labor on Friday.
But while Trump and his surrogates were quick to present this as a huge accomplishment, it is less than meets the eye.
After the jobs report was posted, Ivanka Trump took Twitter to announce the milestone, using the Make America Great Again hashtag.
Since @realDonaldTrump inauguration, over 1 million net new jobs have been created in the American economy! #MAGA
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) August 4, 2017
On Sunday, David Bossie, former Deputy Campaign Manager to Donald Trump and chairman of Citizens United went on Fox News and proclaimed that economic growth is “something we haven’t seen in a very long time.”
But the job growth under Trump is actually down slightly from the final 12 months of President Obama’s presidency. As Politico noted, “an average of 184,000 jobs per month have been created this year, compared to 187,000 in 2016. If you eliminate January, when President Barack Obama was still in office, the monthly average is a somewhat lower 179,000.”
David Bossie: "The President of the United States's leadership has added one million jobs in six months." pic.twitter.com/8Ah385FZMl
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 6, 2017
While one million is a nice number that looks great on headlines and cable news chyrons, the Trump administration has said in previous weeks it reached this number when it hadn’t. As reported in Politico, on June 1 Trump said he’s added 1 million jobs when at that point, the Labor Department only reported about 600,000. Last Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the administration has created over a million new jobs since Trump took office in January,
The recent pivot towards trusting the Bureau of Labor Statistics is deeply ironic in that Trump and his team are touting a statistic that Trump himself has denounced multiple times as “phony,” “fiction,” and “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.”
Unemployment rate only dropped because more people are out of labor force & have stopped looking for work.Not a real recovery, phony numbers
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 7, 2012
Trump’s campaign against the jobs report began during the Obama administration, whose economic policies Trump continue to drive the economic growth.
7.8% unemployment number is a complete fraud as evidenced by the jobless claims number released yesterday.Real unemployment is at least 15%
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 19, 2012