MSNBC business reporters Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle dismantled some of President Donald Trump's boasts about U.S. economic gains under his leadership, showing that his claims, like many of his announcements, are not rooted in reality, both numerically and historically.
With Velshi returning from a two week hiatus, the pair dug into Trump's numbers and found them inaccurate.
"In Nashville, President Trump once again decided he was going to talk about stock market growth," host Velshi began. "He keeps saying we don't talk about this. So let's talk about stock market growth and what it means to America."
"If you're bragging about stock market growth, it's really important to understand that only about half of all American adults hold stock. When the stock market goes up it doesn't affect everybody in the United States."
He then turned Trump's boast about being a job creator.
"Jobs are the other thing that affect people," the host stated, "The president likes to talk about how -- he said about a year ago 'I'm going to be the greatest job creating president God ever created.'"
"Just to note, we had good year. We created 2 million so far in the Trump administration, which is less than the year before and the year before and the year before and the year before and the year before and the year before," he explained using a graphic. "You have to go back to 2010 to find a year in which fewer net new jobs were created than were created this year."
"Often times the president or the administration will talk about these two million jobs like, if you weren't going to get these two million, it would be zero," co-host Ruhle chimed in. "The number is not in a vacuum. Every single month we get a jobs report with an estimated number. It's not like before President Trump was in office we weren't creating any jobs."
"Here's the important piece of context here, and you point this out a lot," Velshi told his co-host. "If the president wouldn't keep carrying on like there's never been a stock market gain and haven't been strong jobs created, then we would be able to say not bad. It's not great at two million, but it's okay. It's pretty good. But we have to now continue to underscore things because the president pretends there were no jobs created."
"That's not true, he might not be pretending, that might be what he believes," co-anchor Ruhle quipped.
Watch the video below via MSNBC:
