Donald Trump bragged about the fact that his government has created “no new jobs” during his presidency—even as federal employees are forced to work without pay during a government shutdown.
The president made the boast as he delivered the keynote speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEOs luncheon in Gyeongju, South Korea.
“One hundred percent of all new jobs created in America under my administration have been created by the private sector,” Trump said. “Think of that. The government created no new jobs. The private sector created the record number of jobs that we’re talking about. That’s a country, that’s really a success.”
He also outlined how he could have fudged the numbers to make his administration look good by creating jobs, which he accused his predecessors of doing. “It’s easy to create government jobs. I could say, ‘Add a lot of people to your payrolls,‘ I could fake up the numbers if I want, but that’s not the way you build a great country,” he told attendees.
“That’s what they used to do under the Biden administration, under Barack Hussein Obama, they’d say ‘Hire a lot of people so we can make our numbers look good,’ I do the opposite.”
The remarks came just one week after Trump set a record as being the man who has presided over the most days of a government shutdown, between this month’s stoppage and the 35-day shutdown of 2018-19.
The shutdown has resulted in thousands of federal employees working without pay, prompting the country’s largest federal workers’ union to call for an end to the shutdown.
While the Trump administration did accept a $130 million donation from billionaire Timothy Mellon in order to cover the salaries of active service members during the shutdown, Democrats were quick to note that the amount would not go far in covering the salaries of over a million soldiers.
At the start of his second term, Trump recruited Tesla CEO Elon Musk to establish the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to hack and slash his way through government agencies in the name of saving money.
But DOGE wasted some $21.7 billion in taxpayer dollars in its wild campaign to slash spending, and left federal agencies including the IRS and the General Services Administration quietly begging fired workers to return to their desks.
In addition, the U.S. has seen a string of disappointing jobs figures, with unemployment edging up during Trump’s second term, prompting Trump to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who he said had ”RIGGED” jobs figures “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Trump fared even worse during his first term in office, during which time, according to FactCheck.org, the economy lost 2.7 million jobs and unemployment climbed by 1.7 points to 6.4 percent.
