President Donald Trump is heading into the general election with the worst jobs numbers of any president, based on records that go back to World War II.
That’s not going to change in the two months between now and Election Day, no matter how the economy does.
The US economy is down 4.7 million jobs since January 2017 when Trump took office, according to the Labor Department.
The August jobs report released Friday showed employers added back about 1.4 million jobs, bringing the unemployment rate to 8.4%. That is still well short of what would be needed to give Trump a positive jobs record by November 3.
The only other President in the last 80 years to own an overall loss in jobs between his inauguration and the following Election Day was George W. Bush in 2004. That was because of the so-called “jobless recovery” after the recession sparked by the dot-com bust. But the loss of 605,000 jobs through September of 2004 was a fraction of the job losses that happened under the Trump administration.
