The art of the lie

When it came to job creation, Trump was vastly outperformed by the other presidents. Bill Clinton oversaw the biggest gain, 23 million additional jobs, followed by Ronald Reagan (16 million), Joe Biden (14 million), and Lyndon Johnson (12 million) – all the way down to George W. Bush (1.4 million). During the presidency of Barack Obama, Trump’s much-reviled predecessor, the United States added 11.6 million jobs.

Trump’s defenders point to the disruptive effect the Covid-19 pandemic had on the American economy. Although the disease crisis certainly undermined employment during his presidency, it’s also true that his denial and mismanagement of the public health emergency deepened its human and economic impact in the United States. Furthermore, even before the pandemic hit, job creation during the Trump presidency was relatively weak. During Trump’s first 31 months in office, employment growth in the United States averaged 176,000 jobs per month. During Biden’s first 31 months in office, employment growth averaged 433,000 jobs per month.

Trump, of course, knew how to create jobs, and, during his 2016 presidential campaign, even touted a specific plan for doing that – a $1 trillion federal program to rebuild America’s infrastructure. “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,” he declared in a speech on the night of his election. “And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”

But Trump had very different priorities and, during his presidency, his infrastructure program never materialized. As a result, federal investments on roads and bridges as a share of the economy remained stagnant, Trump’s promises to upgrade ports and airports went unfulfilled, and federal spending on water infrastructure fell to a 30-year low.

Scrapping its ballyhooed infrastructure plan, the Trump administration instead pushed legislation through Congress in December 2017 that was far more in tune with its real priorities – a $1.9 trillion tax cut favoring corporations and wealthy Americans. “Corporations are literally going wild over this,” Trump chortled. At the same time, adopting the GOP’s trickle-down approach, the administration promoted this legislation (the misnamed “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) as a jobs-creating measure. Trump predicted a boom in business investment and claimed that factories are “not going to be abandoned any longer.”

In fact, none of this followed, and, two years later, business investment was declining while mass layoffs continued. Recalling Trump’s false promises about jobs creation, an embittered welder who had supported Trump in 2016 assailed the president’s choice of tax cuts for the rich over infrastructure investments and lamented that he and other members of the building trades had been “snookered” by Trump’s promises to rebuild the country.

Excerpted: ‘Donald Trump’s Empty Promises on Jobs’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org