Trump's Latest "Victory" in Perspective

"U.S. jobless rate unexpectedly declined to 13.3% in May"-Today's headline in the Washington Post

Well, isn't that wonderful!  It went all the way down from 14.7% to 13.3%, assuming that for one second you believe the Trump administration's numbers.  And Donald was whooping it up!


"Really Big Jobs Report. Great going President Trump!"-Donald J. Trump

"These numbers are incredible!  It’s a stupendous number. It’s joyous, let’s call it like it is."-Donald J. Trump

"This is an AMAZING JOBS REPORT! Edward Lawrence @FoxNews"-Donald J. Trump

And here is a graph, showing the incredible, amazing numbers:

The unemployment rate in the US stood at around 5% when Obama turned the country over to Trump, after eight years of continually falling after spiking under (surprise) the last Republican President.  Now, we are expected to believe that Trump, after presiding over an unemployment number that he drove up to 14.7%, is a genius for getting it to fall to 13.3%.  And let us remember that this drop includes States whose Republican governments have basically forced people to go back to work by conspiring to deny them unemployment benefits.

But, Hallelujah, our savior is here!  The unemployment rate, still the highest since the great depression, is now two and a half times what it was when Trump took over, but he cut 1.4% from it!!!!!!  Hooray!  And that is how it is going to be reported, instead of pointing out that his miserable failure continues almost unabated.


Update:  It's a couple of hours later and I can already find a number of sites claiming that (as I presumed) today's numbers were cooked by the Trump administration, in a manner similar to that used by Nixon and other Republican administrations.  I will keep a close look for what evidence underlies these reports, although my past experience is that it is often years before the truth comes out.  And please don't forget the main point of my post: even if the numbers are real, they still represent a near tripling of the unemployment rate under Trump's guidance- a grotesque failure which, true to form, Trump is claiming to be a huge victory.

Update again:  From our good friends at Daily Kos:

"The actual jobs report appeared later in the day and it did say that the unemployment rate was 13.3%. But it also said that the BLS and the Census Bureau were investigating a “misclassification error” around workers sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic. The truth is that the actual unemployment rate was around 16.3%."

 A "misclassification error."  Which just happened to give Trump something to crow about, even though it wasn't true (as usual.)  Sort of like the store clerk who is always making "mistakes" in giving people change, but curiously enough, never in the customer's favor.

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