{"id":103623,"date":"2026-06-07T01:07:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T01:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/103623\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T01:07:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T01:07:14","slug":"even-trump-says-he-doesnt-know-where-the-hell-his-own-false-claim-about-black-unemployment-came-from-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/103623\/","title":{"rendered":"Even Trump says he doesn\u2019t know \u2018where the hell\u2019 his own false claim about Black unemployment came from"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump uses a lot<\/a> of fictional statistics<\/a>. He usually deploys them with a breezy confidence.<\/p>\n

At an event<\/a> in Wisconsin on Friday, though, he made a statistical claim that sounded so clearly dubious that he wondered aloud where it had come from.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd we\u2019ve also had huge drops in \u2014 and I\u2019ll tell you, this is something that\u2019s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it\u2019s ever done. And I don\u2019t know where that stat came from, but I\u2019ll take it,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know where the hell that stat come \u2014 but we\u2019ll take it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mystery \u201cstat\u201d isn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

The most recent unemployment rate for Black or African Americans was 6.6% in May<\/a>, federal statistics show (all unemployment figures in this article are seasonally adjusted). That\u2019s an improvement from the previous rate, 7.3% in April, and from its highest rate during Trump\u2019s second term, 8.2% last November \u2014 but it\u2019s not close to a record low.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s actually higher than the rate Trump inherited when he returned to office.<\/p>\n

The Black or African American unemployment rate was 6.2% in January 2025, the month of his second inauguration, and 6.1% in December 2024, former President Joe Biden\u2019s last full month in office. In fact, the 6.6% rate last month is higher than the rate in each of the last 34 full months of the Biden administration, from March 2022 through December 2024.<\/p>\n

The record-low Black or African American unemployment rate \u2014 the record at least since the beginning of this federal dataset in the early 1970s \u2014 is 4.8%, set under Biden in April 2023<\/a>. The previous record low, 5.3%, was set during Trump\u2019s first term in August 2019 and September 2019. During Trump\u2019s second term, however, the rate has not been lower than 6%.<\/p>\n

And since Trump spoke vaguely of \u201chuge drops,\u201d it\u2019s worth noting that even the 0.7-percentage-point decline in the Black or African American unemployment rate between April 2026 and May 2026, from 7.3% to 6.6%, was not a record month-to-month drop. For example, there was a 0.9-point decline from March 2024 to April 2024 under Biden, from 6.5% to 5.6%. (It\u2019s always wisest to look at multi-month trends rather than one-month changes, which can be statistically volatile, but we\u2019re covering our fact-check bases here.)<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t clear whether Trump ad-libbed the falsehood or whether he was citing something from his prepared text. The White House has not yet responded to CNN\u2019s requests for an explanation of the claim, sent on Friday night and again on Saturday morning.<\/p>\n

Under presidents from both major parties, the unemployment rate for Black or African Americans has been persistently higher than the rates for other racial groups. The overall national unemployment rate<\/a> was 4.3% in May.<\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump wears the Olympic gold medal of Team USA speedskater Jordan Stolz during on June 5, 2026 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. – Samuel Corum\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Other false Trump numbers<\/p>\n

Trump used other inaccurate and long-debunked supposed statistics at the Wisconsin event<\/a> on Friday. These were among the ones he didn\u2019t question out loud:<\/p>\n

His repeated claim that \u201c$18 trillion\u201d is being invested in the US. That\u2019s an imaginary figure far higher than the \u201c$10.6 trillion\u201d figure the White House\u2019s own website<\/a> used as of Saturday for supposed \u201cmajor investment announcements\u201d during this term \u2013 and even the White House figure is a major exaggeration<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His repeated claim that \u201c25 million\u201d migrants were allowed to enter the country under Biden. This one is also not even close to the truth; through the last full month of the Biden administration, the federal government had recorded<\/a> under 11 million nationwide \u201cencounters\u201d with migrants during that administration, and that includes millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in the so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated<\/a> by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there\u2019s no way the total was close to Trump\u2019s number.<\/p>\n

His repeated claim that \u201cthe Biden administration had the worst inflation in the history of our country.\u201d (He added that other people \u201csay 49 years, 48 years\u201d rather than in history, but said he still thinks \u201cit was forever.\u201d) Peak Biden-era inflation, 9.1% in June 2022<\/a>, was the highest in between 40 and 41 years, not 48 years, and nowhere close to the all-time high of 23.7%<\/a>, which was reached in 1920, or the highest point of Jimmy Carter\u2019s presidency, 14.8%, which was reached in 1980. (And by January 2025, the month Trump was inaugurated, it had fallen to 3%<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump uses a lot of fictional statistics. He usually deploys them with a breezy confidence. At…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[44534,53654,12,3461,74,2690,954],"class_list":["post-103623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-donald-trump","tag-african-american","tag-chippewa-falls","tag-donald-trump","tag-joe-biden","tag-trump","tag-unemployment","tag-wisconsin"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116706151285949729","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}