President Donald Trump has congratulated himself over the black unemployment rate hitting record lows, tweeting ‘I’m so happy about this News!’
The black unemployment rate fell to 6.8 per cent in December, the lowest level since federal data began to be collected in 1972, prompting Trump’s jubilant tweet on Saturday morning.
‘The African American unemployment rate fell to 6.8%, the lowest rate in 45 years. I am so happy about this News!’ Trump wrote.
‘And, in the Washington Post (of all places), headline states, ‘Trumps first year jobs numbers were very, very good’,’ he continued, referencing a news analysis piece that compared Trump’s first year of job numbers favorably to those of his predecessors.
President Donald Trump has congratulated himself over the black unemployment rate hitting record lows, tweeting on Saturday ‘I’m so happy about this News!’
Overall, the US unemployment rate fell to 4.1 per cent in December, the lowest level since December of 2000.
For whites, the unemployment rate held steady at 3.7 per cent in December, and for Hispanics it rose slightly to 4.9 per cent.
Only 8 per cent of black voters supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election, with the demographic swinging heavily toward Democrat Hillary Clinton by an 80-point margin.
During the campaign, Trump’s much-commented upon pitch to black voters was ‘What the hell do you have to loose?’, blaming the Democratic Party for taking their votes for granted with little in return.
The December jobs data marked the first time that black unemployment rates had fallen under 7 per cent, and a two-point decline from when Trump took office last January, when the rate was 8.9 per cent.
This chart shows BLS unemployment data since 1972. The black rate is in blue, the white rate is in red, and the Hispanic rate is green. The gray bars show periods of recession
Pundits split along partisan lines as to whether Trump could legitimately take credit for the strong jobs growth.
‘Recovery was well underway before he came into office,’ Valerie Wilson, director of the program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Newsweek. ‘All he had to do was not do anything to reverse the process.’
But Horace Cooper, an adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, disagreed, saying that Trump’s regulatory rollbacks have expanded job opportunities for blacks in the trades.
‘Strange idea when black men, in particular, are running so far ahead in job growth than any other group, to want to argue that we have a president that doesn’t care about minorities,’ he told the magazine.
‘This is just the opposite. If you are a black person living in America now, this is a sign of things to come.’