TRUMP SOTU - Black Unemployment

"Video: Black Unemployment Under Trump" by Robert Farley, FactCheck.org 2/2/2018

In this week's fact-checking video [below], CNN's Jake Tapper reviews President Donald Trump's claim that the black unemployment rate is the lowest in recorded history “because of my policies.”

While it's true that the black unemployment rate recently reached its lowest level in decades, the rate has been in steady decline for about the last seven years.

As we wrote, the black unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, the lowest it had been in nearly 10 years, when Trump took office in January 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Under Trump, it dropped a full percentage point to 6.8 percent in December.  That's the lowest rate since the bureau began regularly breaking out unemployment rates by race in 1972.

There was a similar decline during the same 11-month period in 2016, but the drop was even more pronounced in each of the three years before that.  In other words, the downward trend continued under Trump, but at a slower pace than in recent years.

As the video notes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest data on Feb. 2 — several days after the President had made the claim.  The black unemployment rate crept back up to 7.7 percent in January, almost exactly the rate when Trump became President.


FactCheck.org and Tapper have been collaborating on fact-checking videos since September 2015.  All of the videos can be found on FactCheck.org.