Trump delusional about 'just how awful' his job market is: analysis

President Donald Trump has recently attempted to tout strong job creation numbers, but according to MS NOW's Steve Benen, the number he cited was completely false, revealing that he is delusional about "just how awful" his job market is.

In a piece published Friday afternoon, Benen, a longtime producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," highlighted a recent address Trump gave to commemorate Women's History Month, during which he meandered off topic to boast about job numbers, "one of his most important failures — which he pretended was one of his impressive accomplishments."

"Since I took office, we created more than 300 — hang on, listen to this — 300,000 jobs now filled by proud, hardworking American women,” Trump said on Thursday, seeming to slur his words while attempting to say the number. “It’s a record... Jobs are coming in through the roof, and we have factories being built all over the country… We’ve taken in $18 trillion-plus in 11 months.”

As Benen noted, multiple aspects of this were false. The boast about "$18 trillion" in investments was a repeated claim from his State of the Union address that has been widely debunked. At the time Trump made that claim last month, the White House website contradicted, listing the level of investment at only $9.7 trillion. Where he got this inflated figure remains unclear.

Benen focused primarily on Trump's claim about creating 300,000 jobs, which is a completely fictitious number, no matter how one tries to reach it. This, he argued, showed Trump's "lack of awareness about just how awful his record on job creation is."

"Is it true, for example, that his administration has created 300,000 jobs?" Benen wrote. "No, that’s not even close to being correct: As we learned earlier this month, the U.S. economy actually lost 90,000 jobs in February, and looking back over the 14 months of Trump’s second term, the cumulative total was 150,000 jobs. (In contrast, in the final 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the American economy added 1.74 million jobs.)"

He continued: "In other words, the president took the actual number, doubled it and then boasted at a Women’s History Month event about setting 'a record' (and that’s without getting into his suggestion that all of those jobs were filled by women)."

These numbers, Benen added, represent some of the worst the U.S. has seen since the Great Recession, with no amount of "make-believe" capable of making them anything other than one of Trump's "greatest embarrassments."