Editors at Issues and Insights probe some of the most harmful claims made about President Trump and find them wanting.
President Donald Trump’s critics have called him many things during his nearly three years in office. “Racist.” “Fascist.” “Misogynist.” “Anti-middle class.” “Anti-poor.” And so on. But if that’s so, he’s failing miserably at all those things they accuse him of.
A spate of recent data and reports, including an update of the income and poverty statistics by the U.S. Census Bureau for 2017 and 2018, show just how bad that failure is.
Take that “racist” charge. The Census report shows that black unemployment, at 5.5% in August, is the lowest it’s been since records started being kept in 1972.
The gap between black unemployment and white unemployment is also the lowest on record.
Typically, the unemployment rate for African Americans is at least two times the white unemployment rate. Today, it’s about 1.6 times the white rate.
It isn’t only African Americans who are doing better. Both Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans now have near-record low unemployment rates. …
… If Trump’s a racist, he’s an abject failure.
What about that other favorite epithet of the left, “misogynist”? If Trump hates women so much, why do his policies seem to provide so many opportunities for them?
As The Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan notes: “Among full-time, year-round workers, the number of women increased by 1.6 million and the number of men increased by about 700,000 between 2017 and 2018.”
The median real income for female-headed households with no spouse rose 5.8% from 2017 to 2018. For married couples, there was no change. The poverty rate for female-led households shrank from 26.2% in 2017 to 24.9% in 2018.
OK, but surely, billionaire Trump hates the poor and his policies have been disastrous for them, right?
In fact, as the Census data show, the number of people living in poverty fell by 1.4 million people in 2018 alone, with the poverty rate dropping from 12.3% to 11.8%, its lowest since before the 2007 financial crisis. That decline was led by female-headed households, minority ones in particular, the most vulnerable of all.