Democratic chief: Las Vegas should blame Trump for crash

LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — Talk about timing.

It’s not a bad day to talk to Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Not only does he run the party, he was also Barack Obama's Secretary of Labor. He knows a thing-or-two about unemployment reports.

May’s numbers came out today, giving President Trump something to crow about.

”This is outstanding what's happened today. Now they thought the number would be a loss of nine million jobs and it was a gain of almost three million jobs,” the president said in the Rose Garden.

Economists were expecting another pandemic-produced dismal jobs report.

Instead, the unemployment rate for March dropped to 13.3 percent. Economists thought it could get as high as 20 percent. Experts say the better numbers were caused by companies calling workers back, indicating signs of stabilization.

“And this leads us on to a long period of growth. We'll go back to having the greatest economy anywhere in the world,” said Trump. His campaign said today the president “built the greatest economy once, and now he’s doing it again.”

The economy was Trump's biggest sales pitch for reelection.

Hold on, Democratic chief Tom Perez tells me.

“This jobs report and the three-month trend, we've lost 19.6 million jobs in the last three months,” Perez told me, referring to March’s loss of 1.3 million jobs, followed by April's drop of almost 21 million jobs. “So when I hear the president spiking the football and saying this is joyous, this is like being 42 points down in a football game and you get a report and now you're 35 points down.”

Democrats are pouncing on the numbers because the economy will play huge here.

The shutdown brought Nevada, and its tourist economy, the highest unemployment in the nation.

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“Every single president since FDR has presided over net job growth. That’s what we always want – we want everyone to succeed. This president is about to join Herbert Hoover because there’s still 12.7 million jobs underwater, even with this job report,” Perez says.

Which gets to Perez' other point: he says blame Trump for the crash the coronavirus caused.

“The original sin of this pandemic was the president's failure to listen in December, January and February. He ignored all the warning indicators,” Perez says.

The White House says Trump was quick to take action. And if the country recovers, Republicans think Nevada could go Trump in 2020, breaking three successive presidential elections our state went blue.

Perez says it will go blue again.

“We have a seven-point advantage in voter registration,” says Perez. “Republicans said Nevada was gonna be in play again in 2018. We swept nearly all the statewide offices in Nevada. Democrats now control the statehouse, the state senate,” he adds.

Perez says he's taking nothing for granted, in what's shaping up to be an election for the history books.