June 1, 2018: The Republican Party Is Taking a Nap - Trump Lied about Job Numbers

 

June 1, 2018: The month starts off badly for Trump and the GOP, then spirals downward. Former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner accuses many in his party of abandoning their principles to get along with the president. “There is no Republican Party,” he says. “There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kinda taking a nap somewhere.”

In other news, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has his bail revoked and gets sent to jail until trial. 

Investigators also recover 731 pages of encrypted phone messages from Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. 

And campaign adviser Roger Stone suddenly remembers he did meet with a Russian offering dirt on Hillary Clinton – but the guy wanted $2 million to share it. 

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani gets nailed in divorce proceedings, from his third wife, because at age 74, he’s having an affair. 

Team Trump, all the way!

Speaker of the House John Boehner.

 

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ANYWAY, TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC is jobs! After sixteen full months in office, it’s not too early to check out the job-creating magic of Donald J. Trump. First, let all of us on the liberal side of the math fence admit that numbers for May 2018 were good. A total of 223,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy. Unemployment dropped to 3.8%, the lowest level in eighteen years. 

Naturally, Trump took 137% of the credit. (Yes, he’s bad at math.) Right-wing pundits pouted because the “mainstream media” refused to praise the president enough. (They’re  also bad at math.) If Trump “created” nearly three million jobs in his first sixteen full months in office, why wouldn’t The New York Times splash the story across its front page with headlines six inches high? 

Alas, part of the reason we of a liberal persuasion so often laugh at Trump and Fox News is that we do not possess the memories of weasels. We remember how Trump reacted when job numbers – the official numbers of the Bureau of Labor Statistics – under Obama were good.

 

In those days, all the good numbers were “rigged.” You can refresh your memory if you like and read a story in the “Fake News” Washington Post. In this story the Post quotes unnamed sources…. 

No, wait. 

The Post quotes Trump. They quote all the times Trump said Obama’s job numbers were “phony,” “the biggest joke there is in this country.”  

When unemployment dropped below 5% in early 2016, Trump wasn’t buying the math. He insisted the number of people looking for jobs was much higher, possibly higher than at any point during the Great Depression. “Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment,” he said. They were much higher, “As high as 35 – as in fact, I heard recently, 42 percent.” 

As the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted in January 2017, however, the real unemployment rate was 4.7 percent when Mr. Obama left the White House. 

And when that number ticked down to 4.6 percent in February, Trump bragged about the great start he was off to as president, magically cutting the rate from, possibly 42 percent, in just one month!

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (1/25/22): This would be a harbinger of what Trump would be like as president. That is, he would often say, “I heard,” rather than state something as fact. Then, if proven wrong, he could deny he was making it up or lying. 

Somehow, his fans would never notice and would fall for this trick again and again and again. See, for example, his claims of a “stolen election,” in November 2020, despite sixty court rulings indicating that the election was legit.