Phony numbers

“Don’t believe those phony numbers,” Trump declared during his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary, in February. “When you hear 4.9 and five-per-cent unemployment, the number’s probably twenty-eight, twenty-nine, as high as thirty-five—in fact, I even heard recently forty-two per cent.” By June, when he did an interview on Fox News’s “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” he’d received new data. “The number five per cent is a phony number—it’s really twenty per cent, close to twenty-per-cent unemployment. That’s just a phony number to make the politicians look good.” In an August speech on the economy, he said, in reference to the official government unemployment rate, “The five-per-cent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics.”