OP-ED: Stop Lying, Trump Didn’t Solve Black Unemployment
“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black,
examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.
The new Black unemployment numbers came out today, and it’s a sign of good news for Black Americans.
Four years ago when Trump was president, the Black unemployment rate was 11.9%. Today, the Labor Department reported it’s 5.7%. That’s a 52% drop in Black unemployment in the last four years.
While Trump tries to scare voters with lies about immigrants taking “Black jobs,” the truth is that 2.5 million more Black Americans have jobs than four years ago, and last year we had the lowest Black unemployment rate in history: 4.8%.
Even more impressive, last year was the first year on record when Black unemployment never rose above 6% at any point during the year. And despite all the talk of leaving Black men behind, the unemployment rate for Black men dropped to 5.1% in September, the first time in a long time when it’s been lower than Black women’s unemployment, which landed at 5.3%.
That’s remarkable.
Under Biden and Harris, the economy has now added 16.2 million new jobs.
Some will complain that the comparison with Trump is unfair because his numbers were skewed by the COVID-19 crisis.
Yes, COVID did affect the economy for Trump, but it also caused supply chain shortages, labor market disruptions, and demand surges that affected inflation for Biden. You can’t blame Biden for Covid-related economic problems of inflation and not blame Trump for the COVID-related economic problems of unemployment. The president’s job is to handle crises, and Trump failed to handle the COVID-19 crisis.
Biden, on the other hand, passed the Inflation Reduction Act, and inflation dropped back down to 2.5%.
When Trump came into office, he inherited a thriving economy from President Obama and made things worse.
When Biden and Harris came into office, they inherited a failing economy from Donald Trump and fixed it.
Every single Republican in Congress voted against those checks.
Contrary to Republican talking points, the economy didn’t just rebound when Biden and Harris took office because the pre-COVID-19 jobs magically came back. It grew because the federal government took active steps, like the American Rescue Plan that Joe Biden signed in March 2021. That law saved the economy from collapse and provided $1,400 stimulus checks to ordinary Americans.
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Every single Republican in Congress voted against those checks — and every other part of the law. But they took credit for it, anyway, after they saw its positive effects.
That’s the way Republicans fool you. They take credit for anything good with the economy and then they blame Democrats for anything bad.
It’s even worse with Trump. He calls any information that’s not good for him “fake news.” And any information that is good for him is completely true — and it’s all because of him.
When Trump first ran for office in 2016 and Black unemployment was going down, he said the numbers were all “phony” and rigged by the government.
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But as soon as he got in office, Trump turned around and took credit for Obama’s Black unemployment record and said the numbers were no longer rigged.
“They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,” Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters.
Ha ha ha. We lied. Very funny.
Whether it’s poll numbers, election results, crowd size, or unemployment numbers, Trump just creates his own reality.
The Trump White House even created a new term to justify their gaslighting lies. They called it “alternative facts.”
It turns out that Republicans are really good at marketing. But not so good for the economy.
Bill Clinton made this point at his Democratic Convention speech in August. “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs,” he said. Democrats created 50 million of those and Republicans only created one. Fact checkers verified it was true.
Clinton inherited a recession from Bush and dug us out of it. Obama inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression from the Second Bush and dug us out of it. And Biden inherited an economic collapse from Trump, who mismanaged the COVID crisis, and the Biden-Harris administration had to dig us out of it too.
When Trump was president, we lost 2.7 million jobs in four years. Under Biden and Harris, the economy has now added 16.2 million new jobs.
In fact, the worst Black unemployment recorded was 21.2% under Republican president Ronald Reagan. And the best Black unemployment rate in history was 4.8% under Democratic President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Republicans want you to forget that history. They want to pretend that Donald Trump is a successful businessman who can make America great again. But Donald Trump is just a great salesman, who is willing to sell mugshots, Bibles, sneakers, NFTs, watches, and himself to the next sucker in line.
Why would you trust a guy who inherited $400 million from his daddy, lost it all, and filed bankruptcy six times?
Look at his record. Trump Casinos went bankrupt. Trump’s USFL Football Team collapsed. Trump Airlines failed. Trump Magazine failed. Trump Steaks failed. Trump Vodka failed. Trump Mortgage failed. Trump University went out of business for fraud. And the Trump Foundation went out of business for fraud. Even his new business, Trump Media, has lost two-thirds of its value in the past six months.
The bottom line is that Donald Trump is a fraud. He’s not good for America. And he’s not good for Black America.
Keith Boykin is a New York Times–bestselling author, TV and film producer, and former CNN political commentator. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Keith served in the White House, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET talk show My Two Cents, and taught at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He’s a Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of seven books. He lives in Los Angeles.
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