Donald Trump Does Complete Flip-Flop On Jobs Numbers Report Data
President Donald Trump is doing a complete flip-flop on the “phony” Labor Department jobs numbers he once endlessly ridiculed.
With the latest government jobs numbers showing that employers added 235,000 jobs to the economy last month, all of sudden the new Republican president is willing to embrace such statistics as worthy indicators of the direction of the country.
With the additions, the overall unemployment rate fell from 4.8 percent to 4.7 percent.
”Great news for American workers: economy added 235,000 new jobs, unemployment rate drops to 4.7%,” Trump tweeted soon after the numbers were made public. ”Not a bad way to start day 50 of this Administration.”
That’s a far tone from candidate Trump, who all but made assailing any remotely similar data an official rung of his campaign platform.
CNN points out that in the roughly two-months since Trump became commander-in-chief the methodology used by the Bureau of Statistics to arrive at such numbers hasn’t changed in the least.
“I talked to the President prior to this and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,’ ” press secretary Sean Spicer nonetheless told reporters.
In the past, Trump has now only derided such “phony” figures, but argued that the true unemployment number hovered somewhere near 28, 29 percent and could be as high 42 percent.
Trump’s complete repudiation of the numbers was widely seen as being part of his grand plan to discredit then president Barack Obama and leaders of the Democratic Party as being ineffective leaders.
Trump offered little evidence for his “phony” clams back then. other than to non-scientifically point out that his rallies wouldn’t be so well-attended if the country was doing as well as some of the numbers would indicate.
In the end, Trump speculated that the numbers were being cooked in Obama’s favor in the name of making him look like a more effective president than he actually was.
But with Trump now at the helm, all of a sudden, the same numbers, composed by the same operative, using the same criteria, have merit.
Meanwhile, Trump’s onslaught against Obama remains far from over, even though he is no longer in power. He recently blasted his predecessor for having allegedly bugged his Trump Tower offices at the height his campaign run.
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” he tweeted. “Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
The Wall Street Journal reported Obama was as furious as he was dumbfounded by Trump’s public assertions.
Supporters of the president have long hinted they are convinced Obama sees himself as “at war” with his successor and those in government that remain loyal to him have been behind all the never-ending leaks that have been pouring from the White House.
Spicer has since hinted that the president based his anti-Obama claims on “reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations.”
Obama was also the target of Trump’s recent unfounded claims charging that his administration allowed as many as “122 vicious prisoners from Guantanamo Bay” to walk away and return to the battlefield to fight against American interests.
Still less than two months in office, the Trump administration has been forced to ward off several public relations related flaps, including a still growing scandal where several members of his campaign have been found to have met with Kremlin leaders during the height of his campaign.
The controversy recently engulfed newly appointed attorney general Jeff Sessions, who has since admitted to meeting with a Russian official after claiming to have no contact with anyone from that sector during his Senate appointment hearings.
[Featured Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
