On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dialed her smarminess up to eleven to deliver some Trump-bragging economics.
Sanders: This President since he took office, in the year and a half that he's been here, has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans. That's 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren't working when this President took place. When President Obama left, after eight years in office, he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans.
That statement was partly right. In that Obama was president for eight years. Everything else about it was a mistake. Which Sanders then proceeded to rectify with a solid non-pology.
Sanders: Correction from today’s briefing: Jobs numbers for Pres Trump and Pres Obama were correct, but the time frame for Pres Obama wasn’t. I’m sorry for the mistake, but no apologies for the 700,000 jobs for African Americans created under President Trump
Though CNN has determined that this somehow counts as an apology, what it really amounts to is a swift kick in the facts. Under President Obama, three million African Americans found jobs. Meaning that Obama generated 700,000 jobs on average in about … the same time that Trump has been in office. Which isn’t surprising, since Donald Trump inherited Barack Obama’s economy—an economy so robust that so far it’s held together through the robbery of Trump’s tax cut for billionaires and the boneheaded-ness of his tariffs for revenge.
Though, while the averages may look similar, Obama took office in the midst of the Great Recession, a record economic downturn generated by Republican policies. Meaning that his first year in office was spent just implementing policies to try and put the country back on track. Since then, Obama created jobs at a more rapid rate than has happened under Trump.
And in the effort to create a cover-up for Sanders, the Council of Economic Advisers for Trump generated another big lie.
At least the apology here includes the word apology—stacked on top of deliberate misinformation.
Take a look at the dates on the “first 20 months” listed above. Obama did not start his term in November of 2008. Neither did Donald Trump start in November of 2016.
Trump’s CEA is deliberately cramming in an extra quarter of Bush’s economic crash into Obama’s first term, and just as deliberately gifting Trump with a boom quarter delivered by Obama. All to make Trump’s numbers look far better than they really are while denigrating President Obama.
So … Sanders “apologizes” for her lie by not apologizing. The Council of Economic Advisers uses the word apology, but ladles on made-up numbers.
Which one is worse?