A day after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs numbers, which showed the economy adding 209,000 jobs in July, Donald Trump and his supporters have been patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
The president posted this self-congratulatory tweet on Friday:
Excellent Jobs Numbers just released – and I have only just begun. Many job stifling regulations continue to fall. Movement back to USA!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 4, 2017
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On AM Joy on Saturday, when a pro-Trump guest said Trump deserves credit for what has been the continuation of former President Barack Obama’s economy, economist Austan Goolsbee used facts to put him in his place.
Video:
.@AUSTAN_GOOLSBEE on why in his view #Trump is taking credit for economic growth from #Obama‘s policies #AMJoy https://t.co/GPMDylbIsT
— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) August 5, 2017
Goolsbee said:
Look, we’ve had I believe 84 months in a row of job growth and the last six of those have been under Donald Trump. It’s like a guy built a house and sold it to someone, and that person walked in and turned the lights on is like, “Look at the house I built.” If you take the job creation under Donald Trump, it’s actually slightly slower than the equivalent just last year. So the first seven months of last year, we added more jobs than we have in the first seven months of this year. … Overall, most of the economy, as you know, has nothing to do with Washington. To the extent that it does have to do with Washington, it’s totally obvious this is merely a continuation at exactly the same rates as what happened under Barack Obama. And I would simply point out that when it happened under President Obama, it was Donald Trump himself saying, “You can’t trust the statistics. These are all lies. There aren’t this many jobs getting created.” And literally, with fewer jobs being created in the same statistics, Donald Trump is now saying, “Look what I did!”
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly talked down the recovering economy and ignored years of private sector job growth because it didn’t align with his narrative that Obama has destroyed the country and only he could fix it. Before Trump took office, he even questioned the legitimacy of the positive jobs numbers.
After more than six months of Donald Trump in White House, nothing has changed other than the man who occupies the Oval Office: The stock market is still climbing, jobs are still being created, the economy is still growing.
It’s not as if these things just started to happen on January 20, 2017.
Obama spent eight years in the White House, first halting what could have been a second Great Depression and then laying the groundwork for the economic growth we are now seeing.
Trump doesn’t get credit for that.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
