That slid past my eyes the first time I saw it. But then I looked again. And although it is a month since this happened, it deserves a really close look, because of what it tells us about the mental state of the man with the nuclear launch codes.
14,000,000 jobs -created by Ivanka Trump?I mean. that is about 50% larger than the populations of Sweden, of Portugal, of the Dominican Republic .... it is a breathtakingly unrealistic and unbelievable figure. As the article below points out, the economy of the entire USA has at most created about 6,000,000 jobs since the last presidential election.
It's so wrong, it's insane. Nobody in a high office in the USA who utters such a figure can be said to be in contact with the basic realities of the country he leads.
And yet Donald Trump said it. So what do we conclude? Stunningly ignorant, or just so confident in the success of his lies that he believes he can get away with anything?
Or maybe his brain is fraying at the edges?
Trump Tells Crowd Ivanka Has Created 14 Million New Jobs
By Jonathan Chait At a speech to the Economic Club of New York today [12 November], President Trump declared that his daughter, Ivanka, has personally created 14 million new jobs. The president announced this figure — so astonishingly ludicrous it would embarrass a Stalin-era pronouncement — and then repeated it twice more as the crowd applauded politely.
The entire U.S. economy has created fewer than 6 million new jobs since Trump took office. So Trump is crediting his daughter with having personally created more than 200 percent of all new jobs in the United States. This is like supply-side economics but for authoritarian nepotism.
Exactly how she did this remains a subject of some confusion. The mechanism involves the “Pledge to America’s Workers,” in which the chief executives of various firms promise to create some arbitrary number of training and other opportunities. You can read about this program at its official White House page, but the details are sparse even by the standards of a White House messaging site. There truly does not seem to be any policy here other than Ivanka asking businesspeople to promise to create jobs.
Last October, Ivanka claimed this initiative had created 6.3 million jobs. Lydia DePillis interviewed some of the companies that contributed to this number, and several admitted they had simply credited all real (or, in some cases, hypothetical) job openings to the Ivanka initiative.
Donald Trump touted this initiative in January, insisting, “My daughter has created millions of jobs.” Now it has more than doubled to 14 million. As Trump told his supportive audience, “14 million and going up!” It is almost certainly true that the number of jobs Trump claims his daughter created is going up. By next year, it might exceed the entire workforce.
