Nancy Pelosi omits pandemic in singling out job losses under Donald Trump

With the economy consistently important to potential 2024 voters, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., compared the job-creation records of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump during a recent interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur.

Pelosi said April 29 that Trump "has the worst record of job loss of any president."

Tur responded that "there was a global pandemic," meaning that Trump’s job creation figures suffered from the coronavirus pandemic that emerged during his term’s final year.

Pelosi responded, "He had the worst record of any president. … If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role. But it ain’t mine."

Coverage of the moment focused on Pelosi calling Tur a Trump "apologist," which Tur rejected. We wanted to fact-check the claim, which we’ve heard before from Biden.

It’s common for presidents and their allies to assign the incumbent too much credit for good economic results on their watch, and for opponents of the president to assign too much blame to the incumbent for weak results. Such assertions are usually fraught, because presidents are one factor — but hardly the only one — in determining how well the economy performs. 

Like Biden’s earlier claim, Pelosi both overlooks some technical history and also overplays Trump’s role over the U.S. economy — which included the once-in-a-century pandemic disruption.

To calculate the change in jobs on a president’s watch, economists turn to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

During Trump’s presidency, the U.S. lost a net 2.7 million jobs.

In comparison, every president since Harry Truman (who served from 1945 to 1953) has gained jobs during his tenure. Bill Clinton, who left office in 2001, oversaw the biggest gain at nearly 23 million, and George W. Bush, who left office in 2009, saw the smallest gain at almost 1.4 million.

The federal government didn’t keep comparable statistics during Hoover’s term (1929 to 1933) or through much of the tenure of his successor, Franklin Roosevelt. But experts say it’s certain the Great Depression would have caused a net loss of jobs under Hoover and the recovery would have produced a net gain of jobs under Roosevelt.

At its peak in 1933, 24.9% of the workforce was unemployed, a figure that didn't include farm workers, who were hit at least as hard as other workers during the Dust Bowl era. Under Trump, the unemployment rate peaked briefly at 14.8% but fell back to half that within about five months. 

Pelosi said Trump had the worst jobs record of "any president." Hoover almost certainly fared worse, and we don’t know about earlier presidents, who served before reliable records were kept. 

When looking at job creation patterns under a president, timing matters. A lot.

Before the pandemic, Trump oversaw a 4.6% employment increase. That trails the rise during the equivalent time period for Biden (about 10%) and Bill Clinton (about 8.1%), but it’s more than the stagnation or shrinkage under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Efforts to restrain the virus’s spread sparked major cutbacks in hospitality, entertainment and restaurants, and in just one month, the unemployment rate more than tripled to a post-World War II record of 14.8%.

The pandemic wiped out the first three years of job gains under Trump. Almost 58% of the lost jobs were back by the time Trump left office in January 2021, but his 2020 loss to Biden meant he didn’t get the chance to regain the rest.

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Pelosi’s office acknowledged that she should have referred to Hoover’s record, but a spokesperson argued that Trump played a role in worsening the pandemic.

Economists have told PolitiFact that providing a pandemic asterisk to Trump’s data is merited.

"Trump certainly could have responded better to it, but it was a worldwide phenomenon, not of his making," Dean Baker, an economist at the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, told PolitiFact in January.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-of-center American Action Forum, agreed that the pandemic was "not comparable" with earlier examples of economic shocks, such as those caused by wars or oil shortages. 

"No policy could have stopped the job losses early in the pandemic," he told PolitiFact in January.

Pelosi said Trump has "the worst record of job loss of any president." 

Trump is the first president in almost a century to see employment decline between his first and last days in office. 

However, experts widely agree that Hoover, the president during the Great Depression, also saw jobs lost on his watch — likely more than Trump, given the severity of the Depression — and it’s possible that earlier presidents who served before standardized employment data was collected did, too.

And even though Tur raised it, Pelosi omitted the primary reason for the employment decline under Trump — the pandemic. 

Presidents are often assigned too much credit for good economic results on their watch and too much blame for poor economic results; in reality, presidential policies are but one factor among many in determining how well the economy performs. 

We rate the statement Half True.