Washington CNN —
Vice President Kamala Harris made false claims about the employment record of her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, during an interview on MSNBC Wednesday night.
Interviewer Stephanie Ruhle asked Harris what she thought about polls that show a majority of voters still think Trump is the better choice when it comes to managing the economy.
“Here’s what I know for a fact: If you look at the jobs numbers, for example, Donald Trump left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression,” Harris said. When Ruhle interjected that the worsening jobs numbers were due to the effects of COVID-19, Harris continued, “Even before the pandemic, he was losing manufacturing jobs. Most people estimate at least 200,000 lost.”
Facts First: Harris’ claim is false. Trump added 414,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs before the COVID-19 pandemic, not “at least 200,000” fewer. And over the course of his presidency, 178,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, not the 200,000 or more that Harris said.
Trump and Manufacturing Jobs
National employment totals go up and down for a variety of reasons other than who the president is, but even if you attribute all of the gains and losses to the president, it’s not true that President Trump caused the nation to lose “at least 200,000” manufacturing jobs before the pandemic.
From his inauguration in January 2017 to February 2020, just before the pandemic broke, the economy added 414,000 manufacturing jobs.
Manufacturing employment, like overall employment, fell sharply in March and April 2020 as much of the economy was shut down, with 1.3 million jobs lost in April 2020 alone. The economy then quickly began to add manufacturing jobs, increasing every month from May to December 2020, before declining slightly in January 2021, but these gains were not enough to make up for the losses in March and April 2020. Thus, the total for President Trump’s four years in office is now 178,000 jobs lost.
When CNN reached out to Harris’ campaign for comment on her inaccurate claim on Wednesday, a campaign aide pointed to similar but accurate comments Harris made about Trump in an economic speech she gave in Pennsylvania earlier that day, in which the aide said, “Across the economy, nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost during his presidency, which began before the pandemic hit.”
That’s true: The steepest decline in manufacturing jobs under Trump occurred during the pandemic, but the decline began before the pandemic: manufacturing jobs, which had been growing under Trump, fell by a net 48,000 jobs in the 13 months between February 2019 and February 2020.
But whether intentionally or out of unawareness of the nuance, the Harris campaign turned even this true claim into a false one on social media. In posting a video of Harris’ remarks, the official Harris campaign account @KamalaHQ paraphrased: “VP Harris: Before the pandemic, nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost under the Trump Administration.”
That’s not what she actually said. She said the job losses started before the pandemic hit, not that the “roughly 200,000” job losses all occurred before the pandemic, which is also not true.
We are not going to make a firm fact-checking judgment on Harris’ vague assertion that “if you look at the jobs numbers, for example, Donald Trump has left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression.”
A Harris campaign aide said she was referring to President Trump’s overall jobs record, which made him the first president since Herbert Hoover, who left office during the Great Depression in 1933, to experience a four-year net job decline.
However, it is worth noting that the unemployment rate in the month the Biden-Harris administration took over from President Trump was not the worst since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate had soared to 14.8% in April 2020, the highest level since 1939, but had already fallen to 6.4% by January 2021, when President Biden took office. This unemployment rate had been surpassed as recently as 2014.
