When job or inflation figures contradict President Donald Trump’s preferred economic narrative, he typically offers alternative statistics to cast a more favorable light on the economy. But Trump’s latest campaign asks Americans to embrace some puzzling logic.
After the U.S. unemployment rate hit a four-year high of 4.6% in November, Trump argued that the labor market is much better than it appears. His reasoning: he could quickly bring millions of Americans back to work—but won’t.
“If I want to make good numbers, I put in 300,000 jobs. I can do that with one phone call,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina on Friday, campaign-style.
He said that if he desired, he could compel government agencies to reinstate jobs they shed this year due to a mix of layoffs, turnover, and workforce reductions under the direction of the Government Efficiency Department.
“They’ll take them back right away. They’ll flood in. And the 4.5% drops to 2.5% in seconds. I could take it to zero—hire a couple million workers,” Trump remarked. “But that ruins the country.”
Trump’s assertion contains numerous factual inaccuracies. This is unsurprising, given that he has doubted employment statistics for a decade—since falsely claiming during the 2016 presidential run that the unemployment rate was 42%, to firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner this summer over revisions showing the labor market was worse off than anticipated.
But the most substantial issue with Trump’s message is that he is once again asking people to disregard their lived experience of a softening labor market—and trust an alternate image of America’s economy that doesn’t align with reality.
Labor Market Mathematics
Trump got several facts wrong in his recent denial of the unemployment rate—the least material of which is that the unemployment rate is 4.6%, according to the BLS, not 4.5% as he claimed.
Trump stated he could lower the jobless rate to 2.5% by rehiring all 271,000 workers shed by U.S. government agencies this year. But Trump was off by a factor of 13—federal agencies would need 3.5 million more people to do that. (The U.S. government currently employs just 2.7 million people, and the federal government has never employed more than 3.5 million.)
Rehiring all 271,000 lost federal positions would reduce the unemployment rate to just 4.4%.
recorded, was 2.5%, last attained in June 1953.
The reason the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from 4% when Trump entered office is that there were 982,000 more people jobless in November than in January. Government employment accounts for only a small sliver of that total.
So Trump’s calculations are significantly hazy—but so is his core message that the U.S. labor market is substantially stronger than the unemployment rate suggests.
The Labor Market Reality
The U.S. economy has lost jobs in three of the last six months, and 2025 anticipates the weakest job growth since 2020.
The lived experience of most people in the labor market also indicates a stagnant job sector: the unemployed increasingly report difficulty finding work, and those currently employed are clinging to their positions.
The era of “quiet quitting” is over. Overall quits are down this year as people remain at their jobs longer: the rate of workers voluntarily leaving dropped to a five-year low in October.
Exacerbating America’s sluggish labor market is the mismatch between sectors that are hiring and the unemployed. For instance, healthcare jobs are increasing, yet more workers in leisure, transportation, and manufacturing are finding themselves without employment.
In other words: what good is a surplus of nursing positions if you are trained in a factory or hotel?
The employment situation is worse for lower-income workers than for high earners, and joblessness for Black Americans is starting to surge—exceeding 8% in November for the first time in four years.
By denying the economic reality people encounter in their daily lives, Trump muddies his economic message and commits the same political error that plagued his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, and contributed to Democrats losing the White House in 2024.
Trump’s History with Unemployment Falsehoods
Trump has been struggling with the veracity of the unemployment rate and other employment data for a decade.
When the unemployment rate dipped below 5% during his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump falsely asserted, “The number is probably 28, 29, up to 35. I’ve even heard 42% recently.”
But in March 2017, following the release of the first full employment report of the Trump presidency, the jobless rate fell from 4.8% to 4.7%. Trump then declared that supposedly “phony” past figures were now “very real.”
“I spoke to the President before this, and he said very clearly to quote him: ‘They may have been phony before, but now they are very real,'” stated Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, on March 10, 2017.
In August 2024, during his recent presidential campaign, Trump complained about Biden’s preliminary annual employment data revision, which showed the U.S. economy added 818,000 fewer jobs the prior year than previously reported. Trump incorrectly called this revision a “record” in a Truth Social post—the 902,000 job revision in 2009 was larger. And the final revision for 2024, released in February, showed 2024 data was overstated by only 589,000 jobs.
This August, Trump sacked the then-BLS Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, whom he accused without proof of manipulating monthly employment reports for “political purposes.” In that month’s report, the BLS revised previously reported job gains for May and June downward by 258,000 positions.
These adjustments, while historically sizable, were not unprecedented. Weaker-than-expected hiring, sampling errors, and low survey response rates can complicate the assessment of the jobs report. However, the BLS continues to collect wage data as it is submitted and revises accordingly.
Casting doubt on the credibility of official data may undermine the vital role of government in helping businesses make sound staffing choices. It is also a dubious political tactic—Trump’s claims that the U.S. labor market is better than it actually is could sow doubt in his own standing, especially with an economy that is one of his most vulnerable issues with voters in the midterm elections.
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