And that is what We Liberals like to Call "Math."

 

May 2, 2025: The right-wing folks celebrated today when news was announced that the economy added 177,000 jobs in April. 

Suddenly, it was “Trump’s economy” again, not “Biden’s economy,” which he said it was, when stock prices were slumping two weeks ago. 

(To be fair, stock prices were also up today.)

 

This hard-working blogger tries to present a fair representation of reality. So, let’s look at the reaction to the jobs report on X, where the ill-informed go to offer up opinions based on nonsense. I’m not sure who started the trend here, but the MAGA types got excited and posted about the April report, citing CNN to prove they weren’t cherry picking good numbers. 

One gentleman posted, with clueless excitement: “477,000 jobs added in one month,” which in his mind proved President Trump was crushing it, since economists expected 135,000! 

MegaBigBalls25 copied that post and spread the good news, setting the MAGA faithful to cheering. 

The glad tidings went out over X, and someone named “Devory Darkins” (below) decided to spread the news even further, also without careful checking. And, still, he got 7.3 thousand likes – which is a sad commentary on the reading comprehension of the MAGA faithful, indeed. 

See if you notice anything amiss: 

 

(Head for the optometrist if you still don’t get it.) 

 

As already stated, the humble blogger tries to present an honest picture of what is going on during the second Trump administration. So let’s look at job numbers over a longer period. In 2024, the U.S. economy added 2,012,000 jobs, or 167,667 per month. 

In 2023, the U.S. economy added 2,594,000 jobs, or 216,167 per month. 

In 2022, the economy added 4,555,000 jobs, a whopping 379,583 per month. Yes. We know. Many of those jobs were added after the COVID collapse began to be reversed. And in 2021, the economy added or recovered 7,237,000 jobs – a massive recovery, any way you analyze it. 

(That’s Joe Biden’s jobs record.)

 

At this point, you are sure to get treated to a dose of the Fox News blah, blah, blah from the MAGA believers; but 177,000 is not a killer jobs report. It’s not bad; but it’s like getting socks for Christmas. 

You can use them, but you won’t be excited. 

In Trump’s first 37 months in office (January 2017-February 2020), during his first term – and before the pandemic hit – he added an average of 185,622 jobs per month (6,868,000 total). 

This blogger does not blame the COVID collapse on President Trump, even if he did suggest idiotic ways to treat infections. So, let’s credit him for a good run during the first three years he held office. 

In the same fashion, this blogger does not blame President Obama, who did inherit a mess, after the U.S. economy crashed under George W. Bush. The economy shed jobs every month, during 2008, with a Republican at the helm, and kept shedding jobs all of 2009, after a Democrat took over. 

Not till October 2010 did the situation finally stabilize – and then for the next 75 months, through December 2016, jobs were added every month, without fail. 

(We give the divided month of January 2017 to Trump, to be gracious.)

 

I will let you do the math, using this graph from the Department of Labor Statistics, and you can see who did better, per month, Obama in his last 75 months, or Trump during his first 37. 

 

Okay, I lied. I couldn’t wait to see if the MAGA faithful would do the math. I did it for them. In Obama’s last 75 months, the U.S. economy added: 

2010   488,000 in the final three months (162,667 per month)

2011   2,058,000 (171,500 per mo.)

2012   2,186,000 (182,167 per mo.)

2013   2,229,000 (191,583 per mo.)

2014   2,991,000 (249,250 per mo.)

2015   2,713,000 (226,083 per mo.)

2016   2,331,000 (194,250 per mo.)

 

That would be: 14,996,000 jobs added, or 199,947 per mo. Or you could say that Mr. Obama did far better in his second term than Trump did in his first, even before COVID shut down the economy. 

And that is what we liberals like to call “math.” 

 

UPDATE: Job numbers are revised twice before they are finalized. The May jobs report cuts the “jobs added” number for March to 120,000. The April number is also revised downward to 147,000. 

The preliminary job numbers for May are 139,000. Clearly, these are not numbers a president can brag about.

February 1-4, 2017: Frederick Douglass Still Going Strong

 

February 1, 2017: Black History Month starts with a mighty bang when Trump summons up the name of a key leader in the fight for equality. “Frederick Douglass is an example of someone who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed,” says the president. 

Apparently, he hasn’t noticed. Douglass died in 1895.

___ 

 

2/2/17: The First Lady decides to delay her move to the White House until summer. That way, the First Family’s youngest, 10-year-old Barron Trump, can finish the school year in New York. The cost for extra security is estimated to be $300,000 daily. GOP fiscal hawks don’t mind, nor does Mr. Trump, even though they used to blast Barack Obama for the costs of all his golfing and his vacationing.

___ 

 

2/3/17: Trump rises early and buckles down to work. At 6:24 am he tweets about low ratings for a TV show near and dear to his heart: “Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger did a really bad job as Governor of California and even worse on the Apprentice...but at least he tried hard!” 

A federal judge blocks the first travel ban.

___ 

 

2/4/17: The president angrily tweets: “The opinion of this so-called judge (see: 2/3/17), which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” 

Clearly, Mr. Trump fails to understand that all federal judges are actual judges. 

As the days pass it will dawn on most Americans: Trump has never read the U.S. Constitution.

Chief Justice John Marshall helped establish the importance of the courts.

March 1-7, 2017: Trump Discovers a Poll He Likes

 

March 1, 2017: Trump earns praise from pundits, left and right, for his speech to Congress the night before. On this fine morning polls show 78% of those who listened responded positively. 

These polls are not “rigged.”

___ 

 

3/2/17: The Illinois offices of the Caterpillar Corporation are raided by federal agents in an investigation into tax fraud begun during the Obama administration. Caterpillar is accused of using illegal tricks to hide money in Switzerland, pay 4-6% in taxes, and live greedily ever after. 

Estimates put the loss to the U.S. Treasury at $2.4 billion, enough, if you’re a Trump fan to pay for a good portion of the proposed 1,954-mile border wall.

___ 

 

3/3/17: A Sikh gentleman, born in India and living near Seattle, is approached in his driveway, and shot by a white assailant. The gunman shouts, “Go back to your own country.” (See: 2/22/17 and 7/16/19.) 

In other words, illegal immigrant criminals aren’t our only problem, and a wall isn’t going to help in this regard. 

In the first month after Trump is elected the Southern Poverty Law Center logs 1,064 hate crimes (thirteen are later found to be unfounded). These include 26 against Trump supporters.  

All hate crimes are repellent. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: People in the U.S. are ten times more likely to be killed by guns than people in 22 other high-income nations. A child in the U.S. has a far greater chance of being killed in an accidental shooting than he or she does by an illegal immigrant. (See: 6/24-25/17.)

___ 

 

3/4/17: The Tweeter-in-Chief stuns rational citizens when he unleashes a flurry of tweets, accusing the previous administration of illegally tapping his phones. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process,” he tweet-fumes. 

__________ 

“Bad (or sick) guy!”

__________ 

 

“This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” 

The heads of the F.B.I. and N.S.A. deny his claim. The head of N.S.A. calls it “ridiculous.” (See also: 3/5/17.)

 

* 

OLIGARCHS ROUND THE WORLD: A Chinese news agency reports that 200 delegates to the nation’s parliament (in a communist country!) have a combined wealth equal to $500 billion.

___ 

 

3/5/17: On Meet the Press former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper rejects the president’s claim that the Obama administration tapped Trump Tower. Trump probably misses his comments because he is spending Sunday morning watching Fox & Friends and tweeting ideas he copies from the show. Trump also salivates watching Abby Huntsman.

Trump loves watching Fox & Friends.
Abby Huntsman, above.

___ 

 

3/6/17: Travel ban 2.0 is issued, but won’t go into effect till March 16, to avoid the wild disruptions that greeted the first ban. (The administration denies there were any wild disruptions.) 

This time, Iraq is dropped from the list of countries from which immigrants will not be allowed. 

The courts block 2.0, too. 

(Trump later prevails at the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s how checks and balances work, even if he doesn’t like it.)

­­­___ 

 

3/7/17: Trump takes a long afternoon nap. For 65 uninterrupted minutes nothing bad happens. (Okay, that one’s made up.)

May 7, 2017: Coal Executives Screwed Miners - Sen. Mitch McConnell Wants Taxpayers to Pay the Bill

 5/7/17: Senator McConnell spends the day brushing up his prose for an Op-Ed article which will appear in the Washington Examiner. 

In coal country, meanwhile, we learn life is good for executives, maybe not so good for miners. Peabody Energy has gone bankrupt, which Fox News blames on Obama. Glen Kellow, who ran the company, receives a $15 million stock bonus payout. Previously, Peabody paid its top executive team $75 million (2012-2014), while losing $2 billion. In 2016 Alpha Natural Resources granted $12 million in bonuses to executives, in recognition of their sterling efforts in 2015, when the company lost $1.3 billion. 

Arch Coal executives earned $8 million in bonuses three days before the company declared bankruptcy.

__________ 

“You couldn’t say nothing.”

__________ 

 

Meanwhile, pay for a United Mine Workers of America union member averages $61,650, closer to $85,000 with overtime. But only 2% of miners are unionized, down from 40% in the 90s. Non-union miners make far less. Carlos Combs, 64, a third-generation miner, lost a union job twenty years ago. Of jobs with non-unionized operators, which are all he can find, he says, “You couldn’t say nothing. You had to take what they gave you.” Eventually, he developed black lung. 

According to The New York Times there’s a bit of good news for men like Combs. Or their widows. “Congress…reached a last-minute deal this week to finance health benefits for more than 20,000 retired miners – miners whose employers have long gone bankrupt, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.” 

In his op-ed article the next day, McConnell will bend reality in astonishing fashion. He writes: 

Last week, we achieved the success that thousands of retired coal miners and their families so desperately needed with the passage of my proposal [emphasis added]. And with President Trump’s signature, it is now law. You may recall that at the end of December, their health benefits were set to expire. If Congress had not acted, approximately 3,000 Kentucky coal miner retirees – and tens of thousands more around the country – would have seen their healthcare benefits end. After years of hard work in the coal mines, they deserved better than having to suffer as collateral damage of former President Barack Obama’s War on Coal.

 

Representing coal-dependent West Virginia, Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito agrees. Congress must find a permanent solution. “These men and women worked hard in dangerous situations to power America and were promised lifetime health care benefits in return.” 

In other words, Americans deserve help with health insurance if they are represented by Republican senators. 

And why did healthcare funds for miners dry up? Maybe, because top company executives were greedy.

 

POSTSCRIPT: This liberal blogger is happy to see miners’ healthcare coverage protected. He does wonder, however, how this doesn’t rile up the Republicans, who purport to hate “socialized medicine.” 

Also, f**k those greedy coal barons, who have been screwing their non-union miners in every way they possibly can.

June 11-16, 2017: Life in Trumpistan - Jobs Added, Witches Hunted, Creepy Cabinet Meetings

 

6/11/17: As usual, Trump has a bee in his bonnet – or under that weird shock of swept-back orange hair. He tweets:

 

“The #FakeNews MSM doesn’t report the great economic news since Election Day. #DOW up 16%. #NASDAQ up 19.5%. Drilling & energy sector...”

 

“...way up. Regulations way down. 600,000+ new jobs added. Unemployment down to 4.3%. Business and economic enthusiasm way up - record levels!”

 

This good news is being reported. By the end of the June the Bureau of Labor Statistics will note that under Trump, 1,081,000 jobs have been added to the economy in the first six months of 2016. 

These numbers, duly noted by the mainstream media every month, are almost as good as the numbers for the last six months of 2016, when, under Obama, 1,254,000 jobs were added.

___ 

 

6/12/17: For once, as the sun sets over the White House, Orange Leader is content. Today he presided over a cabinet meeting for the ages. Sure, it had a creepy, Kim Jong-un kind of feel. 

But such praise for Orange Leader! 

Vice President Jesus kicked off the lovefest. “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people,” Mr. Pence opined. Next up was Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta: “I am privileged to be here – deeply honored – and I want to thank you for your commitment to the American workers.” Sonny Perdue took his turn. The Secretary of Agriculture said he had a message from Mississippi, from whence he had just returned. “They love you there,” he assures Orange Leader. He thanks him for his greatness, and congratulates him for selecting so much other greatness, “the men and women you have gathered around this table.” 

Reince Priebus sums it up, “We thank you for the opportunity to serve your agenda.” (See: 7/29/17.) 

In a glow of pleasure, Trump decides to talk about his favorite subject. Has there ever been a greater president? he asks. He can’t think of one. Oh, maybe FDR did more in the first months of his first term, but no one else is close.

Trump loves to hear about Trump.

___ 

 

6/13/17: Trump surrogates spend the week floating the idea that the president may fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. 

__________ 

“His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity.” 

Newt Gingrich

__________ 

 

Newt Gingrich, known for lying to his wives and getting kicked out as Speaker of the House due to ethics violations, attacks Mueller. “Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair.” 

This is odd. A month earlier, Gingrich tweeted: “Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down.”

___ 

 

6/14/17: Trump takes a fresh look at the healthcare plan passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives (See: 5/4/17.)  

Now he calls it “mean.” 

Displaying his typical lack of understanding of policy details, he insists the Senate “should add some money to it.” (See: 6/28/17.)

___ 

 

6/15/17: It turns out not everyone in the world loves Donald J. Trump, self-proclaimed best president ever (possibly excepting FDR, but, yes, way better than Washington and Lincoln). 

Great Britain has placed on hold a plan to host a state visit for the president. Why? After all, Theresa May, visited Washington D.C. Now, The Guardian reports, Trump is worried about his image. 

He won’t come to Britain if he’s going to have to face large-scale demonstrations. A British reporter explains: 

Some may be surprised by this. From the violence and menace that became features of his ugly campaign, it was easy to assume that he liked a bit of edge at his public appearances. But on those occasions, he knew he would always have the support of far-right thugs and hangers-on who could drown out dissent and, if need be, throw a few punches at protesters, passers-by, anyone who would dare to question him. That intimidation, unprecedented in recent history, would have been more difficult to replicate here; he could hardly bring his street fighters with him. There are only so many seats on Air Force One.

 

The HeraldScotland piles on the “Fake News” with a similar anti-Trump story headlined “Victory for ‘people power’ as Trump puts UK Visit on Hold.” (See: 6/27/17.)

___ 

 

6/16/17: The president fumes and tweets. This time the target of his wrath is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “I’m being investigated for firing the FBI director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!” In case his loyal followers miss it, he adds: “Witch Hunt.” 

For anyone who can remember what happened a month ago, this tweet makes sense only if we ignore the fact the president was going to fire Comey regardless. (See: 5/11/17.)

June 27, 2017: President Trump Now Unpopular on Six of Seven Continents

 

6/27/17: A poll taken by the Pew Research Center shows the president has made himself wildly unpopular on six of seven continents. No polling was done among Antarctic penguins. Worldwide, only 22% of respondents say they trust Trump to do the right thing when it comes to world affairs. By comparison that figure was 64% in the last years of the Obama administration. 

The “good news” for Trump? Only 11% of Russians had a favorable view of Obama. More than half (53%) now express support for Vladimir’s bud. 

How bad has the damage to the reputation of the United States been in five short months of the Trump administration? Worldwide, 71% of respondents disapprove of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Across 37 nations, 76% say they disapprove of his idea of building a wall on the border with Mexico. The rest of the world thinks our president is an obnoxious jerk.

November 24, 2017: Today and Every Day is "Hypocritegate"

 

11/24/17: Trump wants us to understand he’s hard at work the day after Thanksgiving. His first tweet Friday is a complaint aimed at NFL players who dare protest during the playing of the National Anthem. “Can you believe that the disrespect for our Country, our Flag, our Anthem continues without penalty to the players,” he asks. One player who particularly irks Trump is Marshawn Lynch, who was targeted for a special Trump tweet attack earlier in the week. 

And what is Lynch protesting against? 

See if you can guess from this t-shirt Lynch is regularly seen wearing. Then see if you can guess what amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the right of players to protest without penalty. 

 

Sixteen minutes later, in a second tweet, Trump says he plans to talk to the leader of Turkey and clean up the “mess I inherited in the Middle East.” 

Other presidents who might have squealed about problems they inherited (assuming they had had the maturity of five-year-olds): James K. Polk (inherited messes on the Mexican and Canadian borders) and Abraham Lincoln (mess at Fort Sumter). Also inheriting messes: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman (Great Depression; World War II), Dwight D. Eisenhower (Korean War), a whole string of presidents (Vietnam War), Obama (Great Recession) and every occupant of the Oval Office since 1967 (the same Middle East mess that Trump is whining about now). 

Obama inherited two wars.

 

At any rate, the job of running America is so difficult Trump decides he needs time for himself and hits the links. “After Turkey call,” he admits in another tweet, “I will be heading over to Trump National Golf Club, Jupiter, to play golf (quickly) with Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson.” 

Trump, who once lambasted his predecessor for playing what he said was way too much golf, has, for those keeping score, been playing way more golf.  

(Quickly.)  

According to Golf News Net, Trump has already spent at least 79 days since taking office at his golf courses. 

Perhaps you’ve forgotten; but Citizen Trump frequently attacked President Obama for coming from Kenya, stealing the presidency, and hitting the links instead of working hard for the American people. It turns out the pace at which his predecessor played golf was half of Hypocrite-in-Chief Donald J. Trump’s.  

Also: Trump eventually had to admit what every sane American knew. Obama was born in America.

 

 

Hypocrites on the right, with more than a hint of racism. 

You remember those days: When hypocrites on the right, including Trump himself, accused the black guy of being lazy (an old-fashioned racist trope) and always jetting off to vacation and play golf. 

Or, as Fox News pundit Greg Guttfield angrily reported in the fall of 2014, “As the virus struts, the president putts.” 

Also, we fondly remember when Obama put Dijon mustard on his burger! Boy, that made the haters at Fox News hate. 

And there was Tansuitgate.

Right-wingers were outraged when Obama wore a tan suit.

 

And Vacationgate! 

And Golfgate, a variant of Vacationgate!! 

And Fist-Bumpgate? 

And there was the “weakness” shown by Obama when he wore a bicycle helmet while riding a bike? Yes, Helmetgate!

* 

LET’S BE HONEST. For Donald J. Trump, every day is Hypocritegate. The man in incapable of shame.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (2/15/2021): We know now that Trump played almost as many rounds of golf in one term, as Obama played in two. As for Greg Guttfield’s angry comment in 2014, that one didn’t age well at all.  “As the virus struts, the president putts,” could have been the story of Trump’s approach to the COVID-19 catastrophe.