President Donald Trump is known for inflating statistics to paint a distorted picture of his performance as president. With a daily barrage of untruths, exaggerations and flat-out falsehoods, he tries to create his own alternative reality so people forget about his utter incompetence.
He brags about his TV ratings as coronavirus death toll mounts in the United States. And he’s still lying about the number of test kits and protective equipment doctors desperately need to fight of the pandemic.
Now, Trump has boldly added a new lie to the area where he frequently strays from the facts: his daughter’s job performance at the White House.
Ivanka has apparently been working overtime in recent months. This week, Trump hosted a call with business leaders to discuss efforts to provide financial relief to small businesses. During that call, he made an astounding claim: that his daughter Ivanka personally created 15 million jobs.
Yes, Trump just told the completely egregious lie that Ivanka Trump “created over 15 million jobs.” That would be more than twice the total number of jobs created in the country before coronavirus wrecked the economy — or about 10 percent of all the jobs created in the US.
Watch:
Trump just told the completely egregious lie that Ivanka Trump "created over 15 million jobs." That would be more than twice the total number of jobs created in the country before coronavirus wrecked the economy. pic.twitter.com/zniSteAbv6
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2020
To put this claim in perspective, as of January — before the coronavirus pandemic caused the US economy to start hemorrhaging jobs — about 152 million people in the United States were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So Trump is claiming that his daughter created about 10 percent of all the jobs in the United States.
It’s unclear how Trump came up with his astounding claim that Ivanka created so many jobs, but he’s been attributing superhuman job-creating powers to his daughter for quite some time. In a November speech to the Economic Club of New York, he claimed that, by working with companies such as Walmart, she had “created 14 million jobs” over the course of the previous two-and-a-half years.
The entire US economy only added a total of 6.2 million jobs from the beginning of Trump’s presidency through November of 2019. So Trump was effectively claiming that, but for the tireless efforts of his daughter, the United States would have lost nearly 8 million jobs before the coronavirus pandemic even began.
Seriously.
