When NBC News’ Tom Llamas asked Donald Trump about the struggling economy this week, the president seemed eager to respond with a familiar claim.
“OK, you ready?” he asked the anchor. “So we have, it was just announced, more jobs right now occupied in the United States of America that at any time during its existence, 250 years.” The president called this a “pretty good stat.”
As is too often the case, Trump, who’s long struggled to understand economic data at even the most basic level, didn’t know what he was talking about. Putting aside the fact that this statistic was not “just announced” — the president started pushing this same line during his first term — the fact that more Americans are in the workforce is far less amazing than he realizes: As the nation’s population grows, the size of the workforce grows with it.
Every modern president has been able to say the same thing during their terms. It’s just not that big a deal.
Far more important is whether the U.S. economy is actually generating more jobs, and on that front, Trump is failing spectacularly: If we exclude recession years, the first year of his second term was the worst for the U.S. job market in more than two decades.
Indeed, on the heels of the president’s misplaced comment to Llamas, the public got new data on the job market — all of it discouraging. Reuters reported:
U.S. job openings dropped to the lowest level in more than five years in December and data for the prior month was revised lower amid a softening in labor market conditions at the end of 2025.
Job openings, a measure of labor demand, decreased by 386,000 to 6.542 million by the last day of December, the lowest level since September 2020, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report, on Thursday.
To make matters worse, as job openings dropped, CNBC reported that layoffs last month were the worst in any January since 2009, at the height of the Great Recession.
The fact that all Trump has to offer is a meaningless talking point helps explain why the public strongly disapproves of his economic performance.
As for the official unemployment report for January, those numbers are supposed to be released on the first Friday of the month, but because of the recent partial government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will instead unveil the data on Wednesday, Feb. 11. Watch this space.
