Partly True: Trump created 7 million jobs pre-COVID-19.

By: Asavari Sharma
September 8 2020

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7 million jobs were created during Trump's presidency until March 2020. Jobs were being added for 94 straight months of which 18 were under Trump.Republican Senator Tim Scott said at the RNC on August 24, 2020, that President Trump created 7 million jobs pre-COVID 19. According to the household survey data and the non-farm payroll business survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, President Trump created 6.7 million jobs in his first three years in office. On adding the number of jobs added in the first two months of 2020 until the coronavirus pandemic struck in March, the number of jobs added during his terms hovers around the 7 million marks with the economy adding a higher-than-expected 273,000 new jobs in February 2020. Scott's claims are in sync with the narrative being pushed by the Republicans that the economy was in bad shape when Trump assumed office and it was his efforts that transformed the economy. When Trump assumed office in January 2017, the unemployment rate was already low at 4.7 percent. Since then, the rate has fallen an additional 1.2 percentage points, taking it down to 3.5 percent. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobless rate has been continuously falling since February 2010 before it started peaking in March 2020 until it reached an all-time high of 14.7 percent in April 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. According to the Washington Post, the United States added more than 250,000 jobs each month in 2014 and 227,000 a month in 2015. The U.S. accounted for an added 193,000 jobs a month in 2016, which was the last year of former President Barack Obama's presidency. In 2017, Trump's first year in office, monthly job growth slowed to 179,000 per month. Employment jumped to 223,000 a month in 2018 — lower than under President Barack Obama in 2014 and 2015 — and fell back to 175,000 a month in 2019, the Washington Post reported. The median household income, which indicates the income of the household in the very middle of the income distribution, rose for the first time after the Great Recession again in 2015, under Obama, and the rising trend continues even during the Trump administration's reign. In March, the United States lost 1.4 million jobs and a record 20.8 million more in April, according to Department of Labor statistics. The job market plummeted as businesses laid off and furloughed employees owing to the impact of the nationwide lockdown to control the spread of coronavirus. Unemployment rose to a record 14.7% in April, the highest since the Great Depression, and the double-digit trend continued until July 2020. The jobless rate stood at 8.4% in August 2020, BLS reported. All these indicate that Trump inherited a growing economy from the Obama administration with steady trends in macroeconomic indicators, which continued in Trump's presidency until the pandemic struck.