President Donald Trump‘s Twitter fingers just can’t stop lying.
On Tuesday, the commander-in-chief took to social media to take credit for Black America’s historic low unemployment rate, as well as brag about his approval rating among African-Americans being doubled.
The only problem is that it’s simply not true.
Unemployment for Black Americans is the lowest ever recorded. Trump approval ratings with Black Americans has doubled. Thank you, and it will get even (much) better! @FoxNews
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2018
Debunking the Fake News
It’s worth noting that Trump got the polling misinformation from Fox News.
“Believe it or not, through all this negative coverage, they did a survey of 600,000 people about how black America views this president. His numbers have actually doubled,” said “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade.
Kilmeade was referring to recent SurveyMonkey polling results, which found that Trump’s approval rating actually declined to 15 percent in December 2017, from 20 percent in February 2017.
According to the New York Times, the so-called doubling of support was misattributed as the company conducted over 600,000 interviews with adults of every race group, not just African Americans, as suggested.
Kilmeade apparently got his “doubled” number conclusion from Breitbart News, which erroneously averaging the SurveyMonkey results with exit polls from the 2016 presidential election.
As the Times points out, “It is inaccurate to simply take the average of two genders without taking into account the number of people who were actually interviewed for the poll. SurveyMonkey interviewed roughly 19,000 black men and 31,000 black women.
“It is also wrong to compare exit polls to SurveyMonkey’s results. The company surveyed adults who both are, and are not, registered to vote. By contrast, exit polls necessarily survey people who have just voted.”
Black unemployment still doubled that of whites
And while Trump wants to take credit for the African American unemployment rate hitting a historic 6.8 percent, it’s important to put it all in context.
For one, presidents can rarely take credit for solely being responsible for labor market impacts in their first year. The declining unemployment trend was set in motion years before Trump made it in the White House.
In August 2011, the Black unemployment rate was at an alarming 16.4 percent, and saw a decline to 7.8 percent in January 2017. Still, the unemployment rate for Black Americans is, and has always been, doubled that of white Americans.