President Trump on Tuesday claimed that his administration has already created 600,000 jobs since he took office, overstating the number of jobs created during his presidency by potentially hundreds of thousands.
“At the top of our agenda is the creation of great high-paying jobs for American workers, and we’ve made a lot of progress,” Trump told a group of CEOs.
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“You see what’s going on. You see the numbers. We’ve created over 600,000 jobs already in a very short period of time, and it’s going to really start catching on now because some of the things that we’ve done are big league and they are catching on,” he continued, according to the report. “Already we’ve created 600,000 jobs.”
According to the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 533,000 new jobs in the first three months of 2017.
But economists usually credit January job creation — 216,000 this year — to the outgoing president.
For the first two full months under Trump, the U.S. economy added a total of 317,000 jobs, with 98,000 created in March and 219,000 in February.
MarketWatch noted that even if Trump were given credit for a third of the jobs created in January, the total number of jobs would still fall under 400,000.
When asked in February how many January jobs should be credited to the Trump administration, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said officials didn’t have that kind of “breakdown.”
“Cleary, there is a desire for companies to want to come be part of this Trump agenda and build and manufacture, create jobs, and bring jobs back,” Spicer told reporters. “But I’m not at liberty to start parsing the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and other reports as far as where that comes down.”
