White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s credibility couldn’t get much worse, but Donald Trump’s chief spokesperson continues to do lasting harm to her trustworthiness on a frequent basis. Take Tuesday, for example.
Over the course of half a day, Leavitt said the president came up with the “drill, baby, drill” slogan (he didn’t), claimed “100%” of the jobs gained during Joe Biden’s presidency “were for foreign-born workers” (they weren’t), and boasted that “many states” are now seeing gas prices below $2 per gallon (the actual number is zero).
But the whopper that stood out for me came earlier in the day, when she issued a written statement about the latest monthly jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The strong jobs report shows how President Trump is fixing the damage caused by Joe Biden and creating a strong, America First economy in record time,” Leavitt said.
There may be some confusion about what “strong” means.
The latest jobs report, released Tuesday morning, was quite awful. The U.S. unemployment rate has reached its highest level in more than four years, and job growth has slowed to a level that could charitably be described as anemic.
In fact, to help contextualize matters, I put together a new chart showing month-to-month changes to the job market since November 2020, when Trump lost his reelection bid to Biden. The red columns show the months in which Trump was in the White House, while the blue columns reflect Biden’s term.
Those tiny columns on the right side of the image? That’s this year. That’s also what the president expects Americans to see as the greatest economy in the history of the United States.
Indeed, the closer one looks, the worse the American job market appears. According to the latest data, the economy actually lost jobs in June, August and October. When was the last time the U.S. economy had a net job loss three times in six months? Late 2009 into early 2010, when the job market was still trying to recover from the Great Recession.
What’s more, since Trump announced his “Liberation Day” trade tariffs on April 2, the economy has added a grand total of 119,000 jobs — not per month, but cumulatively. For comparison, last year, when Trump said the economy was awful, the U.S. job market averaged almost 168,000 jobs per month, while this year, since “Liberation Day,” the job market averaged roughly 17,000 jobs per month. The grand total of jobs created over the first 11 months of 2025 is 610,000 jobs, which might sound like a lot, but at this point a year ago, over the first 11 months of 2024, the total was almost 1.7 million jobs. In fact, we remain very much on track to see the worst year for job creation since the Great Recession (excluding the massive losses associated with the pandemic in 2020). If the president’s team looked at this data and saw a “strong” jobs report, that might help explain why Trump is failing so spectacularly: The White House doesn’t even know what success looks like.
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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