President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks to members of the media on board Air Force One en route from Scotland, Britain, to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, July 29, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump is fond of one particular brag to try and boast about his economic record, but as a new piece from CNN explained, that brag is a sham because, in practice, the statistic he cites is "nearly meaningless."
Writing for CNN's "Facts First" fact-checking initiative on Monday, reporter Daniel Dale highlighted Trump's recent attempt to tout a "nearly meaningless fact he portrayed as a major accomplishment" when pressed about his cratering approval ratings on the economy.
“I’ll see a poll,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina, “And it’ll say, ‘Trump is at 44 percent on the economy.’ How can it be at 44? We have more people working now than ever before.”
He added later in the same rally speech, "Remember when I say, and I’ll say it again and again: There are more people working today in the United States of America than at any time in the history of our country," and emphasized it a third time for good measure. Despite Trump's fondness for this statistic, Dale explained why it is so useless as a gauge for how well the economy is doing, and wondered if the president is actually aware of this discrepancy.
"It’s not clear whether Trump is genuinely unaware this fact is insignificant or whether he is knowingly hyping an insignificant fact for political gain," Dale wrote. "Regardless, touting the fact 'again and again' is unlikely to do anything for his economic approval — because the fact tells us almost nothing about the state of the economy. The number of people working in the US generally rises over time simply because the population rises over time. With the exception of recessions, like those caused by the financial crisis of 2008 or the COVID-19 crisis of 2020, the number of employed people tends to just get higher as the years pass."
He added later: "Every US president since at least 1948, when modern federal data collection began, could have accurately said at some point during their tenure that more people were working in the U.S. than ever before. That clearly isn’t because each of these presidents was presiding over a pristine economy."
Dale further cited a recent analysis from economist Justin Wolfers, who stressed that "There are more Americans working because there are more Americans. That’s the entire analysis."
Dale argued that the cost of living in the U.S. has been far more impactful on the grim sense voters have of the economy, not the employment rate. It hardly matters if enough people have jobs if their wages do not go as far as they used to. Ratios comparing the employment numbers to the overall population paint a picture that it much more in line with public sentiment.
"But even if you’re looking only at jobs, there are much better ways to gauge the situation than the statistic Trump keeps citing. These other metrics show his second-term economy is far from historically strong," Dale explained. "You can look, for example, at the employment-population ratio, which measures the percentage of the population ages 16 and over that is employed. It’s down from 60.1% in January 2025, the month of Trump’s second inauguration, to 58.9 percent in July 2026 — lower than it was during the entirety of Joe Biden’s last three years as president."
He added: "The pace of job creation has slowed dramatically in Trump’s second term compared with Biden’s term — even if you ignore the early part of Biden’s tenure, when the economy was still bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels. The US gained a seasonally adjusted 2.2 million jobs in Biden’s final 18 months in office, from August 2023 through January 2025. Conversely, the US gained a seasonally adjusted 590,000 jobs in the 18 months from February 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, through July 2026."
