The GOP theory of economics seems to be that the economy was bad under Dubya but then miraculously did a 180 the exact moment that Trump got elected president. Those eight years in between, when the actual transformation took place, is not something they care to acknowledge at all.

In any event, Thursday was the one year anniversary of Trump and Ivanka’s “Pledge To America’s Workers.”

Here’s the 1:00 photo op. It’s terrific. Trump is in a hardhat and Nepotism Barbie plays work, with goggles, wrench, a control panel and all kinds of neat stuff. If they keep producing these, we recommend that you begin stocking motion sickness bags near the computer.

Twelve million commitments to “train and skill.” Skill is a noun. How do you “skill” somebody? Oh wait, I know — it’s like little kids say, “I learned him how to play checkers.” Ivanka is going to skill-learn workers. Or something.

Trump just loves to go on and on about being “the Jobs President.” Bunk. In point of fact, less jobs have been created per month since he took office than under the last two years of Obama’s second term. ProPublica:

President Donald Trump likes to claim credit for the American job boom. He’s not the only president to celebrate job creation under his watch, but Trump is unusual among his peers for frequently attributing specific jobs at specific companies to his own actions.

The U.S. economy has been producing jobs at a healthy clip for years, creating 188,542 jobs a month on average in the first 24 months of Trump’s presidency, compared with 202,417 jobs a month in the last 24 months of the Obama administration.

But how much credit does Trump deserve? We tracked the president’s tweets and speeches about job creation to try to figure out how well his claims stacked up. The answer is: Not well.

Since the election, Trump has made 35 claims that companies would create 8.9 million jobs in the U.S. thanks to his policies and actions. Some of the new jobs he touted failed to materialize. Many of the new jobs he took credit for were, in fact, planned before he took office.

We found that only about 154,000 of those jobs have been created so far.

Roughly 122,000 of those were genuinely new positions, as opposed to slots that were planned before the presidential election.

The bottom line: Only 797 jobs are attributable to Trump, according to the companies that did the hiring.

And this is how Ivanka’s “Pledge To America’s Workers” has really been working out.

Take Trump’s claim in February that his daughter Ivanka created “millions of jobs” through the Pledge to America’s Workers, a White House initiative to encourage professional development for workers across different industries. Trump later provided a more specific number: “Think of it: 6.5 million. And these are jobs that, for the most part, would not have happened.”

But the “opportunities” pledged, which later went up to 7.9 million from over 200 companies, are, in fact, opportunities for retraining and continuing education, not necessarily new jobs.

Just before Trump took office, Alibaba chief Jack Ma stood with the president-elect and promised 1 million U.S. jobs.

But Ma later rescinded that commitment. “The promise was made on the premise of friendly U.S.-China partnership,” Ma said in an interview with Chinese media. “That premise no longer exists today.” In any case, the Chinese e-commerce giant wasn’t planning to build facilities or hire coders in the U.S. The plan all along was to create 1 million indirect jobs by helping American companies sell goods to the Chinese market on its platforms.

The ProPublica article is a blueprint of Trump’s lies about job creation and the actual facts, starting with each claim of Trump saving jobs in chronological order, starting with the Carrier debacle in Indiana, where Trump claimed to have saved 1,100 jobs. In point of fact, Trump counted 300 jobs that were never at risk and ignored 500 jobs that ended up being eliminated.

Then the chart moves on to a particularly wild stat. A Trump spokesman told the Wall Street Journal in 2017 that Trump was “pleased to have played a role” in a decision that Amazon made to create 100,000 jobs. Oh, yeah, Jeff Bezos asks Trump’s advice all the time.

Then there’s WalMart, which Trump thanked for creating 10,000 jobs in January, 2017. Only thing was, WalMart had made the decision to create the jobs in October, 2016, before Trump was elected.

You see the clear and obvious pattern here. Trump is taking credit for things he did not create. Which makes complete sense. He claims to be a self-made billionaire when he inherited his father’s wealth. This is the Trump pattern: take credit for another man’s work, whether it’s Daddy or Obama, no matter. It’s all a game without consequence anyhow — to him. You and I pay the consequences.

Trump puffed, “I’m allowed to be proud of my daughter.” Nobody is disputing that premise, but the bottom line on the “Pledge to America’s Workers” 6.5 Million jobs, is that they are PROMISES to create jobs in the future, but Not.Actual.Jobs. Companies like IBM promised 100,000 “training and skill building opportunities” and Hewlett Packard pledged 6,700 apprenticeships and continuing education programs, but nobody, nowhere has created 6.5 Million actual jobs, let alone the 12 Million that Ivanka touted Thursday. This is another Trump fiction.

What’s frightening, is that for the moment he’s getting away with this fraud, because the wheels haven’t come off the economic wagon yet, but that’s not going to be the case forever. All the signs of a recession are in place now, just like 2008. The country is running on debt financing, both personal and corporate debt, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out a few days ago. The manufacturing sector is in a recession, in decline for the first two quarters of 2018. Plus the “yield curve” which is  a wonky economic indicator referring to the relationship between short-term and long-term interest rates on Treasury notes, inverted earlier this year as well. Vox points out that every US recession over the past 60 years has been preceded by an inverted yield curve.

God forbid Trump sails on to reelection on the waves of a strong economy. Because with all he’s done to undermine it so far with the whack a mole trade deals and loss of world markets, probably permanent, plus the indicators just noted, if he has another four years to mess things up, I fear that the Second Great Depression that Obama averted will finally come to pass.

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1 COMMENT

  1. I’d be curious to know what Ivanka meant by “+300 companies.”

    If she meant “more than/over 300 companies,” then most NORMAL people write that as “300+ companies.” The way Mrs Kushner wrote the comment, that would suggest that there was some unmentioned number to which 300 companies were added–that’s the normal understanding of “+300 companies.”

    And the end of that tweet was pretty oddly written: “. . . a commitment to 12 Million American lives improved.” For starters, “improved” indicates something that has already happened (even when used as an adjective; think of a product that’s described as “new and improved”–the improvement has already happened, rather than something to come). And IF she intended it as an adjective (“12 million improved American lives”), then–while it’s not grammatically incorrect, as an adjective can follow the noun for emphasis (as in the Christmas hymn, “O Holy Night,” which has that really high part of “oh, night divine”; or the way Stan Lee was wont to describe characters like Dr Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme, or referring to the Silver Surfer’s “power cosmic”) but, in this instance, it just sounds, and reads, like someone whose first language is NOT English. It would be better worded, not to mention make more sense, as “. . . a commitment to improving 12 million American lives” since the commitment is to do something in the future (whether immediate or distant) rather than a fait accompli.

    • The entire freaking family is functionally illiterate. Look at her words, “train and skill workers.” She probably thinks that a skilled worker is a worker who has been skilled — as if “skilling” is something one has done to oneself. It’s not even a WORD! I think she’s seriously that limited linguistically.

      Bear in mind, this is not a family that values human achievement. They are shallow, undeveloped, boorish people. You take away their money and they are nothing.

      But did you love her playing Career Barbie, screwing around with the wrench and wearing the goggles, all that? Oh yeah, she knows what it is to be a worker among workers. She’s been skilled. Gag.

      • To this day, I still just cannot fathom the idea that anyone coherent, not being dead, could actually believe that a lifelong business failure…like oh say, Trump…could run our country like a business, like HIS businesses and do anything other than run it into the ground. Now I wonder if when, not if, but when the next great depression comes, of course it won’t be his fault nothing ever is but who will he blame???

  3. She made a conscious decision at some point to go all in with this monstrous, monumental grift of the American public. She is a parasite, a cancer.

  4. It’s a Shame those europe leaders didn’t want too talk and efficiency her grate and beautiful Job creation ideas. The best ideas! Sad!

    (It’s harder to write a Trump-style sentence than I would have thought.)

    • It’s good. You’re there. You have all the elements, random capitalization, mis-spellings, bad grammar and most importantly, stupid ideas. You could be a Trump speech writer and give Stephen Miller a run for the money.

  5. Ivanka is a shallow, greedy, self-absorbed traitor to her gender. The #1 thing she HAS to do before congratulating herself about what she’s done for women is stand on the roof of the White House and SCREAM her unequivocal support for women’s reproductive freedom without limitations. Without that she’s just blowing smoke; women can never be equal; women can never improve their economic condition. As long s she won’t forcefully stand up to daddy on this, she’s a nobody — just a lying grifter.

    • Ivanka couldn’t care less. She’s the queen bee. You think she cares about the average woman? No, not unless the woman is going to clean her house or work in her factory.

  6. You’ll never catch her on the floor under a plotter-paper drawer, clearing a paper jam. I’ve done that more than once. (I doubt she’s ever been on the floor under a desk or in a cubicle, retrieving a dropped item from that back corner.)

    • I mean…duh…if you drop something on the floor you either throw it away and buy a new one, or pick it up and have it shipped to Australia to be sanitized. But either way the slaves will take care of it…that’s what they’re for.

      How are you not familiar with basic office protocols 101?

  7. I watched the video, and I swear to God that at the end the voiceover said, “governments invest in the great assassin, the American worker.” Or maybe I’m just crazy.

  8. First of all I take issue with Trump being allowed to be proud of his daughter. What exactly has she done that a decent father would be proud of?

    More specifically on the issue of jobs, while Ivanka has in fact created lots of jobs they’ve been overwhelmingly sweat-shop jobs in China & other foreign countries where labor is so readily and easily exploited – people working for crap wages in appalling conditions. Oh, and while I don’t know much about fashion I gather many of “her” designs (at least the ones that sold some) are rip-offs of actual designers with, you know something called talent.

    • You know what I loved? You remember, right after Trump got elected, he and Ivanka appeared on 60 Minutes? She was wearing a $10,000 diamond bracelet and there was a commercial for the bracelet. No sensibility that maybe that was crass and tasteless. Hell, no. It was standard operation procedure in Trump world.

  9. I strongly suspect her “Pledge to America” initiative is a sinister 2020 strategy..to allow her to travel around the country and meet with Governors and state officials who can help manipulate election in GOP favor…..”Pledge” travel
    (read her twitter feed) is a Trojan Horse….
    Who know what goes on behind the scenes…ie she was in Georgia/February meeting w/Kemp
    “Georgia’s new voting system actually decreases election security,” https://qz.com/1661870/georgias-new-voting-tech-raises-questions-over-election-security/

    Friday she was in FLorida w/Pence
    @IvankaTrump
    visited Jacksonville, FL to show their support for American workers who are benefitting from
    @realDonaldTrump
    ’s commitment to #SecondChanceHiring programs!
    Gov. Ron DeSantis and members of Congress have been caught off-guard once again by a newly released intelligence report on Russian elections interference.
    Follow Ivanka’s travels

    • Follow her twitter feed/lots of us Progressives do to counter her lies…
      @IvankaTrump hurts to type this link
      Her part in the 2020 election theft strategy is transparent

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