His lips were moving during a town hall hosted by Fox's Sean Hannity in Iowa last night, so we all know he's lying:
TRUMP: We gave you the biggest tax cut in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. We would have been reducing taxes even further, and that's why, Sean, that's why we had the most jobs of any president ever.
Because we gave... we got rid of regulations. Tremendous, no president got rid of more regulations. Not even close, and we gave you the big tax cuts.
So everybody had incentive and everybody was happy. And everybody was working. I remember groups came to see me that wouldn't normally like me, and they said, we've never seen anything like it. We were actually starting to get along, and then we got hit with the China virus. Some people think purposely. I don't. I think it was incompetence. But some people think purposely, because we were doing so much better than any other country ever and we got hit.
But I will tell you, we would be paying that debt off now at levels never seen before. It would be a beautiful thing.
CNN's Daniel Dale debunked these same talking points back in September. We all know we weren't going to get any fact-checking from Hannity.
In a campaign speech at a rally in South Dakota on Friday, former President Donald Trump delivered lengthy and detailed criticism of the US economy under President Joe Biden – accusing Biden of deceiving the public on the subject of “Bidenomics.”
But many of the economic claims Trump himself made in the speech were not true.
[...]
Trump rejected the legitimacy of the unemployment rate under Biden – as he regularly did before he was elected in 2016 but stopped doing upon entering the White House.
Trump claimed on Friday that, while he was president, “Everybody had jobs, everybody was happy. Now you’re given phony numbers, because far fewer people are looking for jobs. So they throw around – although it just went up – but they throw around ‘3.5, 3.6, 3.7%’ – but it’s a different group of people. They’re looking for jobs, but many of ‘em aren’t looking for jobs, so it’s a fake number.”
Facts First: Trump made two false claims here. First, his assertion that “everybody had jobs” when he was president is, clearly, inaccurate hyperbole; the unemployment rate was 6.3% when he left office in January 2021 and 3.5% even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. And it’s entirely baseless to say that the current unemployment rate, 3.8% for August, is “fake.” While the unemployment rate always has limitations in explaining the state of the labor market – which is why the federal government collects and releases numerous other employment-related figures – the unemployment rate is no less legitimate now than it was when Trump was in office and repeatedly touting the unemployment rate with no caveats.
[...]
Trump claimed, “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs have been created nationwide.” After a digression into other criticism of Biden, he continued, “By contrast, during the first 30 months of President Trump, we created 4.9 million new jobs, shattering all predictions and projections.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that just 2.1 million new jobs were created in Biden’s first 30 months in office is false. Without mentioning that he was doing so, Trump was using a self-serving definition of “new jobs” that sharply reduced Biden’s total – and the “2.1 million” figure is much too low even going by Trump’s own definition.
Through July, the 30th full month of Biden’s presidency, the US economy had added more than 13.4 million total nonfarm jobs under Biden, going from just under 143 million to more than 156 million. So where did Trump get the claim that just 2.1 million new jobs were created during that period? PolitiFact reported in August that Trump’s campaign explained that they were not crediting Biden for the first roughly 11 million jobs added during the Biden presidency. The campaign claimed that those jobs were not newly created, merely returned from the pandemic, and only brought the country back to pre-pandemic Trump levels.
But even if you accept the argument that Biden deserves zero credit for millions of jobs being added under his watch – and a variety of economists who spoke to PolitiFact rejected the argument – Trump subtracted far too many jobs from Biden’s column.
When Biden took office in January 2021, the economy was about 9.4 million jobs below the pre-pandemic peak set in February 2020. By adding more than 13.4 million jobs over Biden’s first 30 full months, therefore, the country went roughly 4 million jobs above the pre-pandemic peak. In other words, Trump’s claim that just 2.1 million new jobs were created in Biden’s first 30 months is wrong even by his own definition of “new jobs.”
And Trump was deceptive by omission in failing to explain that he was excluding most Biden-era job gains by using that unconventional definition. People can come to their own conclusions about whether the definition is fair, but when Trump doesn’t even explain that he is using it, he leaves open the impression that far more jobs were created in his own first 30 months than in Biden’s. The reality is the opposite.
The Biden-Harris campaign reacted to Trump lie with this tweet:
