“All told, almost 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during his presidency, starting before the pandemic hit, making Trump one of the biggest losers ever on manufacturing.”
“Even before the pandemic, he lost manufacturing jobs, by most people’s estimates at least 200,000.”
— Harris, a few hours later in an interview with MSNBC
This is a good example of how a cleverly phrased line in a speech can get bungled when a politician tries to repeat it later off the cuff.
In the speech, Harris’s phrasing was defensible. But the wording in the interview was wrong.
Donald Trump’s economic record before the pandemic was pretty good, with steady growth in overall jobs. But in 2019, the year before the pandemic, manufacturing went into a mild recession, and the number of manufacturing jobs fell nearly 50,000 from January 2019 to February 2020.
While president, Trump never acknowledged this dip and instead kept insisting manufacturing was on an upswing. From February 2017, the first month of jobs data in his presidency, to the time the pandemic struck in March 2020, manufacturing jobs increased about 400,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — though Trump kept rounding up to 500,000 even as jobs were shedding.
