He commented on the most recent Labor Department report on employment, which said that in February, 235,000 jobs were added to the US labor market, and unemployment dropped to a mere 4.7 percent. While it's a matter of debate how much of this is due to the current president, and how much is the lasting long term effect of decisions made by the previous president, it certainly is good news. The unemployment remains low, at least for now, after a 7 year streak of consecutive drops under Obama. Sure, just as many jobs were added both in February 2016 and February 2015, but it's not bad. And, well, looking closer at the statistics, the unemployment rate actually increased slightly both in December 2016 and January 2017, so it's still not quite as low as it was in November 2016 at 4.6 percent, before Donald Trump won the election and couldn't reasonably take any credit, but still: the curve hasn't turned immediately and sharply upwards under President* Trump, and that's good, right?
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| Graph by Ben Moore - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link |
The problem here for the Trump administration is that President* Trump has always slammed these Labor Department reports as "phony" and claimed that they are "total fabrications" which can't be trusted. On his campaign trail, he consistently tried to muddle the waters by saying that "actual" unemployment numbers were much higher and could be "as much as 28% or 29%, even 35%", or some other number he appeared to make up on the fly. On at least one occasion, he told a particularly whopping lie and claimed that the unemployment was actually 42 percent, which is nothing short of ludicrous. An echo of this insanely inflated figure was still heard in his address to the Congress just a couple of weeks ago, when he claimed that "94 million Americans are out of the labor force". Technically, that's true: 94 million US citizens over the age of 16 are not working. However, most of them are either retired, still in school, or spouses choosing to stay at home. Only about 11 million of those 94 million people are actually looking for a job.
During his campaign, Donald Trump had a political agenda to slam President Obama for creating an "American carnage" with nation-wide unemployment high and on the rise, and therefore he had to ignore the facts that unemployment has been dropping consistently each year since a high mark of 10 percent when President Obama took office in 2009.
Of course, one of the journalists in the press room asked the pertinent question if we should believe the statistics from the Labor Department, considering that the president had called bogus on every single one of these reports for well over a year. Spicer suddenly looked very relieved and offered this response with a broad smile that looked absolutely sincere:
“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.”Spicer literally said this with a laugh, and the press corps joined in the laughter. It was a moment of bonding between information worker professionals, finally agreeing over something that had long been a point of unnecessary contention. Adding to the fun was that everybody, quite possibly Spicer included, enjoyed silently mocking the President for his utterly stupid remark. For a moment, the press room seemed a little brighter and the air felt easier to breathe.
And then, unfortunately, they moved on.
I understand. They needed the laugh. It was a moment of much needed comic relief, a rare occasion where Spicer could face the press with some dignity and quote the president word for word on a sensitive issue, instead of having to think of yet another lie to tell on behalf of his delusional boss. I laughed, too. It was a nice, human moment in a room which had been sullied by fights, anger and bizarre lies for much too long. I totally get it. But we must think more carefully about it.
This is not a laughing matter. Not at all. President* Trump does not get to decide when we are to believe in government issued statistics, when we should consider it "real" and when we are to disregard it as "fake news". The Labor Department has used exactly the same methods to generate the data point for February 2017 as it has for every month for many years, and if this month's figures are reliable, they all are. If the unemployment starts to rise, we will surely see President* Trump denouncing the reports as "phony" once again. After all, it was only a month ago when the President said about his declining popularity ratings, apparently in full earnest:
"Any negative polls are fake."President* Trump is fickle beyond belief and shows a reckless disregard for the truth whenever he speaks. The fact that we could find a way to laugh at one of his stupid lies this once does not mean that he can get away with it. A person who wants to decide what is true and what is false, in a totally arbitrary manner based on nothing but his own opinions and his own brittle ego, is not a person fit to be the president of a democracy. Only a person with the mindset of a dictator would even try to get a monopoly on the truth. President* Trump is very obviously not fit for his job.
