White House falsely claims Trump has created more jobs for black Americans than Obama did

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August 14, 2018 10:59 PM

Sanders was responding to questions about whether Trump has ever used a racial slur. She said the president’s policies have helped black people.

WHAT WAS SAID

“This president, since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here, has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans. That’s 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren’t working when this president took place. When President Obama left after eight years in office — eight years in office — he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans. President Trump, in his first year and a half, has already tripled what President Obama did in eight years.”

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at a White House news briefing on Tuesday

THE FACTS

False.

But it is not true that the Trump administration has already created three times as many jobs for black Americans as the Obama administration did.

According to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 708,000 more black Americans had jobs in July than in January 2017, the month Trump took office.

By contrast, the same data show, the economy added about 3 million jobs for black Americans between January 2009 and January 2017, during Obama’s presidency.

Obama took office at the height of the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate for black Americans was 12.7 percent. It increased to almost 17 percent, in March 2010, and then fell to 7.8 percent by January 2017, Obama’s last month in office.

The black unemployment rate has continued to fall under Trump and was 6.6 percent in July.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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