President Trump now insists he is not the person to thank for economic growth numbers in February, despite accepting praise for the upshift last month.
Trump told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview that aired Thursday evening the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) numbers are still inaccurate.
“You look at the 96 million people, you look at all of these people,” Trump said, referring to the actual number of those out-of-work and not filing for unemployment.
“Employment numbers, unemployment numbers – and so they say 4.6, 4.7, and I’m supposed to take a bow. But they’re not really the numbers, because you have people that want jobs that have given up looking for jobs. And when you start adding those numbers onto your numbers, it’s not — it’s not really reflective of where I see.”
During his campaign, Trump called the federal employment numbers “phony” — just as former President Barack Obama was seeing a downward turn in the number filing for unemployment, which the Democrat said was due to economic growth.
“Don’t believe these phony numbers when you hear 4.9 (%) and 5% unemployment,” Trump told his supporters after winning the New Hampshire primary a year ago. “The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42%.”
When BLS announced earlier this month that 235,000 new jobs were added in February, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said told reporters at a press briefing Trump was responsible for the growth.
“I talked to the President prior to this and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,'” Spicer said.
