Speaking in front of the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, Donald Trump made a claim that stood out as extreme even among his nearly infinite catalogue of bizarre lies. His daughter Ivanka Trump, an unelected government official, was directly responsible for the creation of 14 million jobs, he said.
“When she started this two and half years ago, her goal was 500,000 jobs,” the US president said.
Trump’s daughter is the co-chair of the White House workforce policy advisory board.
“She’s now created 14m jobs. And they’re being trained by these great companies – the greatest companies in the world – because the government can’t train them,” he said to applause from the crowd.
Lest one be left with the impression that this lie was sufficiently ridiculous, the president appended it immediately with an even more exaggerated prognostication. “Fourteen million … and going up,” he said.
Since Trump took office, the entire economy has added about 6m jobs as of October, according to FactCheck.org.
Earlier this year Trump floated a smaller version of this lie, claiming in February that his daughter had created “millions” of jobs. At the time he was referencing an effort from the workforce policy board to convince companies to pledge to offer “more than 6.5m training opportunities to workers over the next five years”, as the Washington Post pointed out.
Trump herself has also been misleading on the issue, saying in October that her efforts had led to “6.3m jobs.”
Many of these “jobs” are in fact training opportunities that have been pledged to be made available at some point over the next five years by various companies in a non-binding agreement and publicity move, which is nice, but nowhere close to the president’s lie that so many jobs have already been created.