Trump Celebrates Drudge Item On Jobs Report (Which Trump Previously Claimed Is A “Totally Phony Hoax”)

The Washington Post reports:

America is great again. Why? Because, in Donald Trump’s first full month as president, the economy added 235,000 jobs according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Boom. And so the Drudge Report went ahead and declared Trump’s hat’s mission accomplished. Trump retweeted Drudge’s enthusiasm.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that the 235,000 jobs added — a figure that could be revised next month — is not the biggest gain we’ve seen in recent months. In fact, former president Barack Obama enjoyed 30 months during which the number of jobs rose more by more than 235,000.

But the WaPo also can’t help reminding us of this:



Over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump looked for ways to suggest that the economy was in turmoil. While the picture for every American wasn’t rosy, the country was in much better shape than it had been a few years earlier at the tail end of the Great Recession. So as a candidate Trump cobbled together several unorthodox measures that he’d discuss at campaign stops and in interviews to suggest that things weren’t as great as they looked.

On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released jobs numbers from Trump’s first full month in office. The addition of 235,000 people to the employment rolls was good news, though not exceptional compared with other recent jobs reports. But who cares, right? Those aren’t the important metrics, according to Trump (though he did retweet an enthusiastic Drudge Report story about that number for some reason).

By his own measures, Trump’s first month wasn’t a runaway success. After he won the New Hampshire primary last February, Trump discussed the unemployment rate. “Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.” So we will not believe the “phony” 4.7 percent rate the BLS announced Friday.