With public opinion polls showing broad public dissatisfaction with the economy, Donald Trump spent last week emphasizing two points. The first was the president’s stated belief that the economic status quo is so amazing that it deserves to be seen as the single greatest economy in the history of the United States.

The Republican’s second point was that his only problem relates to public relations.

“We’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion and an extremely great job of running the country,” Trump said on Wednesday. He added a day later, “The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations.”

These are certainly sentiments that might soothe the president’s ego, but on Friday morning, reality intervened once again: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest report, the last round of data before the midterm elections, showed the economy added just 29,000 jobs in September as the unemployment rate inched higher to 4.2%. Making matters worse, wage growth continued to cool over the summer, failing to keep pace with the inflation rate, and job totals from July and August were revised down.

In fact, according to the latest figures, the economy lost jobs in July, marking the sixth time since last summer that job growth in the U.S. turned negative — something that did not happen at any point during Joe Biden’s presidency.

All told, the U.S. economy has added 728,000 jobs over Trump’s 21-month second term. Over the previous 21 months, the economy added nearly 3.18 million jobs.

To contextualize the data, I put together this chart to show month-to-month totals since the 2020 election. The blue columns point to Biden’s presidency, while the red columns point to Trump’s.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council and the top economist in the White House, argued that Americans should believe “the government hard data” instead of recent polls. At that point, host Jake Tapper reminded his guest that the government hard data showed anemic job growth in September.

“Oh, come on,” Hassett replied. “That’s just last month.”

In fairness, that’s not an entirely outrageous position to take. Indeed, I’ve long argued that month-to-month changes are not as important as larger trends.

The problem for Hassett and his boss, however, is that the larger trends actually paint an even worse picture. I put together an additional chart showing job growth by year, spanning January through September, which helps show that the first year of Trump’s current term was the worst for American job growth since the Great Recession, and the second year of his current is the second worst.

To date, the White House hasn’t even tried to explain why the domestic job market worsened after the Republican president’s second term began.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Job numbers make clear that Trump has a reality problem, not a public relations problem appeared first on MS NOW.

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