Analysis by David Goldman, CNN
(CNN) — When jobs or inflation data counter President Donald Trump’s preferred economic narrative, he typically offers alternative statistics to shine a more positive light on the economy. But Trump’s latest effort asks Americans to buy into some puzzling logic.
After America’s unemployment rate hit a four-year high of 4.6% in November, Trump made the argument that the job market is far better than it appears. His reasoning: He could quickly put millions of Americans to back to work – but won’t.
“Now, if I want to make some good numbers, I’ll add 300,000 jobs. I can do it with one phone call,” Trump said at a campaign-style rally in North Carolina Friday.
He said, if he wanted to, he could force government agencies to add jobs that they lost this year through a combination of resignations, attrition and staffing reductions led by the Department of Government Efficiency.
“They’ll hire them immediately. They’ll pour in. And the 4.5% would be down to 2.5% in a matter of moments. I could get it down to zero – hire a couple of million workers,” Trump said. “But that’s the destruction of a country.”
Trump’s argument contains numerous factual errors. That’s no surprise, considering he has been second guessing jobs statistics for a decade – from when he falsely stated during the 2016 presidential campaign that the jobless rate was 42%, to when he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner this summer over revisions that showed the labor market was worse off than previously expected.
But the most significant problem with Trump’s message is he once again is asking people to ignore their lived experiences of a weakening job market – and believe in an alternative portrait of America’s economy that doesn’t match reality.
The job market math
Trump got a number of the facts wrong in his recent unemployment rate denial – the least of which is that the unemployment rate stands at 4.6%, according to the BLS, not 4.5%, as he stated.
Trump said he could get the unemployment rate down to 2.5% by rehiring all 271,000 workers eliminated from US government payrolls this year. But Trump was off by a factor of 13 – federal agencies would need to employ 3.5 million more people to accomplish that. (Only 2.7 million people currently work for the US government, and the the federal government has never employed more than 3.5 million people.)
Rehiring for all the 271,000 lost federal worker positions would take the unemployment rate down to just 4.4%.
To get the unemployment rate down to “zero,” it would take more than the couple of million government employees that Trump suggested: Federal agencies would need to add 7.8 million positions. Zero unemployment has never come close to happening – the lowest US unemployment rate ever recorded was 2.5%, last achieved in June 1953.
The reason the unemployment rate has risen to 4.6% from 4% when Trump took office is because there were 982,000 more unemployed people in November than in January. Government work is responsible for just a fraction of that.
So Trump’s math is seriously fuzzy – but so is his underlying message that the US job market is significantly stronger than the unemployment rate suggests.
The job market reality
The US economy has lost jobs in three of the past six months, and 2025 is on pace to post the worst job growth since 2020.
The lived experience of most people in the labor force also shows the job market is stuck: People who don’t have work are increasingly complaining that they can’t get a job, and folks who have a job are cleaving to them tightly.
The era of quiet quitting is over. Quitting, in general, has been out of vogue this year, as people stay in their jobs for longer: The rate of workers who voluntarily quit their jobs fell to a five-year low in October.
Exacerbating America’s stuck job market is a mismatch between the industries that are hiring and people who are unemployed. For example, jobs are growing in the health care industry, but an increasing number of workers in the leisure, transportation and manufacturing sectors are out of a job.
In other words: Who cares if there are nursing jobs if you’re trained as a factory or hotel worker?
The jobs situation is worse for lower-income workers than high-income employees, and Black unemployment is starting to surge – it rose above 8% in November for the first time in four years.
By denying the economic reality that people are experiencing in their everyday lives, Trump is muddying his economic message and making the same political mistake that haunted his predecessor, former President Joe Biden and contributed to the Democrats losing the White House in 2024.
Trump’s history of unemployment untruths
Trump has had a decade-long struggle with the truth about the unemployment rate and other jobs data.
As the unemployment rate was falling below 5% during his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump falsely stated, “The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42%.”
But in March 2017, after the first full jobs report of Trump’s presidency was released, the unemployment rate fell to 4.7% from 4.8%. So Trump then claimed that the supposedly “fake” numbers of the past were now “real.”
“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,’” said Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, on March 10, 2017.
In August 2024, during his most recent presidential campaign, Trump complained about a preliminary annual revision to Biden’s jobs numbers that showed the US economy had added 818,000 fewer jobs over the previous year than earlier reported. Trump in a Truth Social post incorrectly called that revision a “record” – a 902,000-job revision in 2009 was larger. And the final 2024 revision, issued in February, showed that the 2024 data was overestimated by only 589,000 jobs.
In August of this year, Trump fired then-BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, whom he accused, without evidence, of manipulating the monthly jobs reports for “political purposes.” In that month’s report, the BLS revised down the previously reported gains for May and June by a combined 258,000 jobs.
Those revisions, though historically large, were not unprecedented. Weaker-than-expected hiring, sampling errors and low survey responses can make the jobs report more challenging to estimate. But the BLS continues to collect the payroll data as it’s reported, and it revises the data accordingly.
Calling into question the validity of official data could undermine the government’s important role in helping businesses make informed decisions about hiring. It’s also a dubious political tactic – Trump’s claims that the US job market is better than it really is could sow doubts about his own credibility, particularly on the economy, which is one of his most vulnerable issues with voters in the midterm elections.
The-CNN-Wire