On Tuesday, President Trump hosted a call with business leaders to discuss efforts to provide financial relief to small businesses. During that call, he made an astounding claim: that his daughter Ivanka personally created 15 million jobs.
Trump claims that his daughter created 10 percent of all the jobs in the United States
Ivanka, the jobs wizard.
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
To put this claim in perspective, as of January — before the coronavirus pandemic caused the US economy to start hemorrhaging jobs — about 152 million people in the United States were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So Trump is claiming that his daughter created about 10 percent of all the jobs in the United States.
Ivanka has apparently been working overtime in recent months: During a White House event last November, Trump claimed that his daughter has “gotten jobs for” 14 million people. So, if one takes Trump’s statements at face value, she created a million jobs in just the past six months.
As my colleague Aaron Rupar notes, Trump appears to be referring to Ivanka’s work on an advisory board that she co-chairs, but there’s no evidence that this board has created anywhere close to 15 million jobs.
The workforce policy board Ivanka co-chairs works with private companies to get them to offer training opportunities to workers. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, the fruit of that effort has been companies offering more than 6.5 million training opportunities to workers. That’s nothing to sneeze at — workforce development is important — but a training opportunity is not the same thing as an actual job.
It’s unclear how Trump came up with his astounding claim that Ivanka created so many jobs, but he’s been attributing superhuman job-creating powers to his daughter for quite some time. In a November speech to the Economic Club of New York, he claimed that, by working with companies such as Walmart, she had “created 14 million jobs” over the course of the previous two-and-a-half years.
The entire US economy only added a total of 6.2 million jobs from the beginning of Trump’s presidency through November of 2019. So Trump was effectively claiming that, but for the tireless efforts of his daughter, the United States would have lost nearly 8 million jobs before the coronavirus pandemic even began.
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