For Americans concerned about the U.S. job market, it’s become increasingly difficult to remain optimistic. Although the government shutdown has prevented some of the most recent data from reaching the public, we already know that in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, job growth has slowed to levels unseen since the Great Recession.
Recent headlines suggest conditions are getting worse. This week, a variety of corporate giants (Amazon, Target, UPS and others) have announced significant layoffs. The Wall Street Journal reported, “The nation’s largest employers have a new message for office workers: help not wanted. … [T]ens of thousands of newly laid off white-collar workers in America are entering a stagnant job market with seemingly no place for them.”
The day after that report was published, however, the American president pushed an unfortunate boast at an event in South Korea.
Trump: "100% of all new jobs created in America under my new administration have been created by the private sector. Think of that. The government created no new jobs. The private sector created the record number of jobs that we're talking about. That's a country … these are real numbers."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-29T04:37:20.883Z
“If you look, 100% of all new jobs created in America under my administration have been created by the private sector,” Trump claimed. “Think of that. The government created no new jobs. The private sector created the record number of jobs that we’re talking about. … We have real numbers. These are real numbers.”
The Republican went on to argue that Barack Obama and Joe Biden, during their respective presidencies, secretly plotted to boost government hiring to pad their employment numbers.
There’s quite a bit to unpack here, but this is one of the nation’s biggest and most important issues, so let’s take a minute to tease apart Trump’s overlapping and nonsensical lies.
Trump said all of the new jobs created in the U.S. this year have been in the private sector. According to the Trump administration’s own data, that’s not true.
Relatedly, the Republican made it sound as if there’s something inherently bad about public sector jobs, but that’s absurd: Firefighters, teachers, police officers and librarians are all public sector employees, and the suggestion that their jobs are somehow lesser because taxpayers are responsible for their salaries is ridiculous.
While we’re at it, let’s also take a moment to note that private sector job growth was robust during the Obama and Biden presidencies, and the proposition that two Democratic administrations hatched some kind of secret plot to pad the data is quite bonkers, even by Trump standards.
But of particular interest was the incumbent American president’s claim that the private sector has generated a “record number of jobs” — a point Trump punctuated by bragging about his “real numbers.”
Reality tells a very different story.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is part of Trump’s Labor Department, these are the year-by-year totals for private sector job growth, covering January through August. (I’m using August as a cutoff point because the government shutdown blocked the release of the data from September. In other words, I’m using the most up-to-date statistics available.)
2009: -4.3 million
2010: 670,000
2011: 1.5 million
2012: 1.5 million
2013: 1.6 million
2014: 1.9 million
2015: 1.6 million 2016: 1.4 million 2017: 1.5 million 2018: 1.7 million 2019: 1.2 million 2020: -10.2 million 2021: 4.3 million 2022: 3.3 million 2023: 1.3 million 2024: 821,000 2025: 590,000 If Trump wants to argue that the 590,000 private sector jobs created over the first eight months of this year represent an impressive total, fine. He’s welcome to try. But, excluding 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, this year is the worst year for the private sector job market since the Great Recession. The White House may not want to talk about this, and the data might not make the president happy, but these are the actual “real numbers.”
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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