Well brace yourselves for this bit of tap dancing. During President Obama’s eight years as president, conservatives went so far over the edge to deny his economic successes that they accused the job numbers of being fake when they weren’t busy saying that the economy and job numbers didn’t really reflect on the president at all.
But now, when Trump hasn’t been in office long enough to have any kind of impact on job numbers, they are all about taking credit for the work Obama did.
“Great news for American workers: economy added 235,000 new jobs, unemployment rate drops to 4.7% in first report for @POTUS Trump,” Spicer shared, suggesting that suddenly conservatives believe in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers now.
Great news for American workers: economy added 235,000 new jobs, unemployment rate drops to 4.7% in first report for @POTUS Trump
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— Sean Spicer (@PressSec) March 10, 2017
In point of fact, the job numbers this February mirror the job numbers under Obama for February of 2015: 238,000 and February of 2016, 237,000.
Over the past 3 months, BLS says “job gains have averaged 209,000 per month.”
Conservatives spent eight years not wanting to be a part of the solution after the economy cratered under President Bush, but now they want to ascribe the results of the previous administration’s policies to their own side.
No reasonable person would take credit for impacting job numbers in February when they took office January 20th.
But then, we have established that “reasonable” is not the first adjective one reaches for when describing Donald Trump and his crew.
The fact remains that President Obama’s job growth numbers were historic, he left office with the longest consecutive job creation streak in 75 years.
We can only hope that Donald Trump manages not to screw up Obama’s job record when his own policies are enacted. If Trump managed to succeed on this, it would be good for the country.
It’s natural that the Trump administration would clutch this tiny bit of good news and try to spread it all over the chaotic and let’s face it, disastrous roll out of Trump’s presidency thus far. When you’re being accused of possibly colluding with a foreign government to get into office and possibly continuing to do so, taking credit for your predecessor’s good job numbers isn’t really a big deal. And it’s not like this particular bit of political showboating is a Trumpism. This is something all politicians do to some degree, although denying reality under Obama takes the hypocrisy of this to new levels.
But facts are a big deal, and the fact of the matter is this is not a Trump victory. We hope he does have job growth victories, but this job growth victory is not his.
Trump promised to fix Obama’s supposedly terrible job numbers and economy (not accurate at all). So that would presume that having the same numbers as Obama did the last two years is not a fix. We await the fix.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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