On Tuesday, President Trump hosted a call with business leaders to discuss efforts to provide financial relief to small businesses. During that call, he made an astounding claim: that his daughter Ivanka personally created 15 million jobs.
To put this claim in perspective, as of January — before the coronavirus pandemic caused the US economy to start hemorrhaging jobs — about 152 million people in the United States were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So Tr
ump is claiming that his daughter created about 10 percent of all the jobs in the United States.
Ivanka has apparently been working overtime in recent months: During a White House event last November, Trump claimed that his daughter has “gotten jobs for” 14 million people. So, if one takes Trump’s statements at face value, she created a million jobs in just the past six months.
As my colleague Aaron Rupar notes, Trump appears to be referring to Ivanka’s work on an advisory board that she co-chairs, but there’s no evidence that this board has created anywhere close to 15 million jobs.
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It’s unclear how Trump came up with his astounding claim that Ivanka created so many jobs, but he’s been attributing superhuman job-creating powers to his daughter for quite some time. In a November speech to the Economic Club of New York, he claimed that, by working with companies such as Walmart, she had “created 14 million jobs” over the course of the previous two-and-a-half years.
The entire US economy only added a total of 6.2 million jobs from the beginning of Trump’s presidency through November of 2019. So Trump was effectively claiming that, but for the tireless efforts of his daughter, the United States would have lost nearly 8 million jobs before the coronavirus pandemic even began.
Ok. So he’s exaggerating. What else is new?
But this is actually important:
The economic task force will include people from the private sector as well as top administration officials, some of whom also serve on the coronavirus task force — though the two will be separate.
- Ivanka Trump, who has turned her attention to the administration’s small business efforts, will also be part of the group, per a White House official.
The SBA loan program is royal mess and it needs to be fixed immediately or the long-term economic consequences are going to be severe. We know how Jared has managed to completely botch the disaster response. Now he’s putting his totally unqualified, dilettante daughter to work on this?
There are a lot of Trump voters who own small businesses. They are getting increasingly desperate. And they aren’t the types to think it’s cute that Trump put his daughter on the job of helping them out.