On Saturday’s inaugural edition of The Van Jones Show, Jay-Z took issue with Trump taking credit for lowering black unemployment.
Specifically, Jones asked if it’s okay for Trump to diss blacks as long as he “put[s] money in our pockets.” Truth be told, Jay-Z gave a rambling answer – filled with rich-man platitudes about money not buying happiness and laced with a riff that ended with him calling Trump a racist “superbug.” This sums up what he said:
It goes back to the whole thing – ‘treat me really bad and pay me well.’ It’s not going to lead to happiness, it’s going to lead to, again, the same thing – everyone’s going to be sick.
(CNN, January 28, 2018)
True to form, the thin-skinned Trump perceived a mortal slight that warranted this presidential tweet:
Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2018
For the record, the 2008 financial crisis caused black unemployment to rise to a high of 16.8 in March 2010.
- Thanks to Obama’s policies, that rate fell to 7.9 in November 2016, the month Trump was elected president of the United States.
- Thanks to Trump’s policies, which mostly continued Obama’s, that rate has now fallen to 6.8.
The point is that, under Obama, black unemployment fell from 16.8 to 7.9, for a truly praiseworthy drop of 8.9 percent. Under Trump, it fell from 7.9 to 6.8, for a thanks-for-not-f*cking-up-this-trend drop of 1.1 percent.
Yet, after jumping on the trend near this record low, Trump is taking all the credit. Frankly, this is as lame as a runner joining the Marathon at mile 23 (of 26.2) and expecting everyone to cheer him for setting a new world record. Unfortunately, the gaslit media will let him get away with this “big lie” (too).
Mind you, at 6.8, the black unemployment rate is still twice the white rate of 3.7. But this hardly matters to Trump’s big lie about creating more jobs for blacks than any president in US history.
If they were not so easily manipulated, however, reporters would be challenging him to explain what specific policies he’s implementing to bridge that unemployment gap. He wouldn’t be able to, of course, because he has no such policies.
NOTE: Lest Trump trolls accuse me of sharing fake data, all of the unemployment data cited above come courtesy of the Trump administration’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics extracted on: January 28, 2018 (5:20:44 PM).