President Donald Trump can not be consistently trusted — he has lied more than 13,000 times and counting while in office, and this Friday was no different. Early in the morning, he got on Twitter to promote the jobs report for October, and in the process, he claimed that the economy had added far more jobs than it actually had according to all available information for October. CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta was among those to bluntly call Trump out for seemingly pulling key “facts” out of thin air yet again.
In reply to Trump’s tweet claiming a “BLOWOUT” jobs report chronicling 303,000 jobs, Acosta wrote:
‘These are not the correct jobs numbers for October. The US economy added 128,000 jobs in October.’
Again, it’s unclear where Trump got his idea that the economy added 303,000 jobs. Even adding up all the revisions included in the report for previous months does not equal 303,000. He claimed that the figure was adjusted, but — adjusted according to what? Whatever numbers randomly popped into his head when he was composing the tweet?
He tweeted:
‘Wow, a blowout JOBS number just out, adjusted for revisions and the General Motors strike, 303,000. This is far greater than expectations. USA ROCKS!’
The figure he cites is simply nowhere in the actual report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released. We’ve sunk to the level where the president is fumbling basic facts yet again.
It seems unlikely that Trump will clarify the situation. When he seemed to accidentally include Alabama in the list of states that would feel dangerous effects from this year’s Hurricane Dorian, he refused to admit that error. Instead, the cover-up debacle reached the point of him appearing in the Oval Office next to an official National Hurricane Center forecast that had a Sharpie’d on segment to include Alabama.
Trump has offered those kinds of brazen lies in economic contexts before, too. Earlier this year, Trump claimed that his team had been on the phone with Chinese officials who were keen on getting trade talks going, but those calls never happened. The stock market still got a temporary boost anyway.
Check out Twitter’s response to Acosta…
