When Donald Trump sat down with Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow yesterday, the former president had every reason to expect a friendly interview. After all, the host served as the director of the National Economic Council in Trump’s White House. The former president was directly responsible for hiring Kudlow.
But there’s a difference between a friendly interview and an interview in which key details are simply made up. From the Fox Business report:
On “Kudlow,” host Larry Kudlow presented Trump with several recent and comparative economic statistics, contrasting 2.1 million jobs created in the first 30 months of Biden’s term versus 4.9 million during the same length of his tenure.
According to the transcript, at one point the host told his guest, in apparent reference to President Joe Biden, “He says he’s created 13 million new jobs. Nobody can find it, OK, 2.1 million. You had 4.9 million.”
At that point, Trump said, “Right.”
But it wasn’t right.
When I say I don’t know where Kudlow’s numbers come from, I’m being quite literal. The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is responsible for measuring job growth and the monthly unemployment rate, and there’s simply no resemblance between the publicly available BLS data and the numbers the Fox Business host presented to viewers on the air.
Reasonable people can disagree with what counts as the “first” month of a presidency — do we include the January in which a new president is inaugurated, or do we only include full months? — but for sake of convenience, let’s start the clock for Trump in January 2017, and for Biden, January 2021.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the course of Trump’s first 30 months in the White House, which covers a period long before the Covid crisis, the U.S. economy created 5.39 million jobs — more than the 4.9 million Kudlow referenced during the interview. There’s nothing wrong with an economy that creates 5.39 million jobs in 30 months — it’s a perfectly respectable number — though it’s worth noting for context that in the last 30 months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the economy created 6.57 million jobs.
How does Trump explain the fact that job growth slowed after he took office? He’s never said, and as best as I can tell, he’s never been asked.
As for Biden, Kudlow said that the Democratic incumbent “says he’s created 13 million new jobs. Nobody can find it, OK, 2.1 million.” I’m not sure who “nobody” referred to, but everyone can go to the BLS website and see that in the first 30 months of Biden’s term, the economy created 13.68 million jobs.
(If we tweak the measurements, and start the clocks at February 2017 and February 2021, the totals are not significantly different: 5.24 million jobs across Trump’s first 30 months, and 13.37 million for Biden.) This data coincides with a new report, released today, that showed the unemployment rate across more than half the states at or below 3%. That includes record lows in 11 states. All of which is to say, comparing American job growth across Biden’s and Trump’s first 30 months doesn’t do the latter any favors. Viewers who watched the Fox Business segment might’ve noticed, however, that the job numbers came with an on-screen asterisk that read, “New jobs exclude jobs previously lost to Covid.” In other words, the White House’s agenda helped fuel an unexpectedly rapid jobs recovery after Biden succeeded Trump, but according to Kudlow’s program, most of the new jobs created after Biden’s inauguration don’t really count. That’s not an easy argument to take seriously, and it doesn’t change the fact that the United States is enjoying the lowest unemployment rate since the 1960s.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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