For some people, there’s a certain appeal to leaders who follow their gut when making decisions and “shooting from the hip” when they speak. They see a kind of realness in it that seems absent from a carefully prepared speech that files off anything that might sound politically unpopular.
However, recent years have given more opportunities than many of us would like to realize that this preferred kind of talk isn’t necessarily any realer than a calculated speech. While the latter can involve cherry-picking facts that make the speaker look good and downplaying the ones that don’t, the “shoot from the hip” approach doesn’t necessarily have any basis in fact at all.
RELATED STORIES
And a recent statement from President Donald Trump illustrates the important difference between what someone might believe to be true and what actually is true.
Speaking to the Economic Club of New York yesterday, President Trump had a lot to say about his daughter Ivanka’s dedication to increasing employment.
As he said , “When she started this two-and-a-half years ago, her goal was 500,000 jobs. She’s now created 14 million jobs.”
What he’s specifically referring to is her responsibility for his administration’s workforce development portfolio.
According to The White House , this role extends to her position as co-chair of The National Council of the American Worker as established via executive order last year.
This council was apparently tasked with developing a national strategy for training and re-training workers, which is then intended to spur on further employment opportunities.
While it’s unclear where exactly President Trump is getting this number of 14 million new jobs from, CNN reported that Ivanka herself claimed the White House created 6.3 million new jobs at a state event last year.
However, those training opportunities pledged by the companies involved weren’t necessarily as new as Ivanka suggested.
A representative from Associated General Contractors said that they understood the event as a means to highlight training programs that were already underway and not an initiative by Ivanka Trump or the White House at large to create new training programs.
Similarly, the Associated Builders and Contractors pledged 500,000 training opportunities over the next five years, but that was found to be based on what was needed for the volume of work. If any of these potential new jobs were in response to the state event, that wasn’t actually specified.
This apparent misunderstanding serves to provide some insight into the discrepancy between both Donald and Ivanka Trump’s claims and the actual tally of new American jobs.
As Forbes reported , the figures released by the U.S. Department of Labor put total job growth under Trump’s administration at approximately 5.597 million new jobs to date.
For comparison, this adds up to 1.5 million fewer new jobs than were created during the last two-and-a-half years of President Barack Obama’s time in office.
So not only do the recorded numbers fall well short of President Trump’s claim of 14 million new jobs, but also Ivanka’s claim of 6.3 million new opportunities as stated last year.
But while we can trace Ivanka’s statements back to responses to the Pledge to America’s Workers she was partially responsible for, no available data seems to explain how the president arrived at the 14,000,000 figure for new jobs that he personally credited his daughter for.
h/t: New York Magazine
