AFRICAN AMERICANS/JOBS/NONTRUTHS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump held a rally at Pittsburgh’s airport on Saturday [3-11-18] evening to try to shore up support for Rick Saccone, the Republican on the ballot in a special election on Tuesday to fill a House seat representing a conservative western Pennsylvania district.
But he spent most of his 75-minute speech veering into other topics, including foreign policy, trade and the economy. In doing so, he made a number of false or misleading claims, including some The New York Times has previously checked…
‘African-American unemployment two months ago reached the lowest level in history and last month it went up a little bit, right? And I made the mistake, because I didn’t know it went up, and it wasn’t quite as good but it wasn’t historic. So I was in a different month and I said African unemployment is the lowest level in history. They killed me. Because it was the previous month. But here’s the good news. The new month brought it down to the lowest level. So now it’s the lowest level.’
This needs context.
The unemployment rate for black Americans did indeed reach a historic low, 6.8 percent, in December. It then rose to 7.7 percent in January and came back down to a near-historic low of 6.9 percent in February.
But the rate has been in decline for several years, decreasing steadily from 16.4 percent in August 2011 to 7.8 percent in January 2017, right before Mr. Trump took office.
These figures also do not provide a sense of the racial unemployment gap, which has remained unchanged. The black unemployment rate has consistently been double that of the white unemployment rate throughout this period.”
-Justin Bank, “Six Claims Trump Made at His Weekend Rally That Were False or Lacked Context,” The New York Times online, Mar. 12, 2018