President Donald Trump uses a lot of fictional statistics. He usually deploys them with a breezy confidence.
At an event in Wisconsin on Friday, though, he made a statistical claim that sounded so clearly dubious that he wondered aloud where it had come from.
“And we’ve also had huge drops in — and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done. And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come — but we’ll take it.”
The mystery “stat” isn’t true.
The most recent unemployment rate for Black or African Americans was 6.6% in May, federal statistics show (all unemployment figures in this article are seasonally adjusted). That’s an improvement from the previous rate, 7.3% in April, and from its highest rate during Trump’s second term, 8.2% last November — but it’s not close to a record low.
It’s actually higher than the rate Trump inherited when he returned to office.
The Black or African American unemployment rate was 6.2% in January 2025, the month of his second inauguration, and 6.1% in December 2024, former President Joe Biden’s last full month in office. In fact, the 6.6% rate last month is higher than the rate in each of the last 34 full months of the Biden administration, from March 2022 through December 2024.
The record-low Black or African American unemployment rate — the record at least since the beginning of this federal dataset...
The SVD strongly denied the allegations against Villanueva, calling them an act of “bearing false witness.” “We intend to hold accountable those who have chosen to bear false witness,” the SVD sta...