By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

On Friday, ex-President Donald Trump claimed that America’s 4.1 percent unemployment rate was the worst jobs report in our nation’s history. But the facts show that not only was it lower or equal to 23 monthly job reports of the Trump Presidency. It was nearly a full percentage point below Trump’s average jobless numbers during his administration.

Such an obvious false statement from President Trump leads one to wonder whether it’s a deliberate lie, or whether Trump didn’t read his own Labor Department reports, or if it’s some kind of cognitive issue, since even most students know such unemployment numbers pale in comparison to the historical record from the Panics of 1837, 1873-1879, the Great Depression, the early 1980s, and the Great Recession.

As Caroline Vakil from The Hill notes “Former President Trump panned a jobs report released by the Labor Department on Friday, calling it the “worst jobs report in the history of our country” during a rally in Michigan.”

At the Warren, Michigan rally, Trump “weaved” on. “And just think, this is not good news for them,” Trump said of the Democrats. “I mean, how would you like to have an election in four days, and you just had the worst jobs report in the history of our country, practically.”

For some reason, Vakil chose not to fact-check Trump on his claim that a 4.1 percent jobless rate was the worst in our nation’s history, though it would have been easy to do so. Just the Great Depression and Great Recession alone would have debunked that Trump claim. Perhaps like others in the media, she may be nervous about the verbal threats issued to the media.

Vakil did pass on some positive economic news. “At the same time, Commerce Department data released this week has pointed to some strong economic data points, finding that from July to September the country’s gross domestic product rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate.” And that’s despite the devastating hurricanes Helene and Milton. Matt Egan of CNN reports that Biden is beating Trump on stocks, and recent history favors the Democratic Party Presidents on returns.

I researched the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for myself. You can too, here. I compared all four years of the Trump Administration and compared it to the Biden-Harris reports from January 2021 through October of 2024. Trump’s average monthly unemployment rate was 5.00625. For the Biden-Harris, their average monthly unemployment rate was 4.16087.

So no, a 4.1 percent unemployment rate could not have been the worst jobs report ever. In fact, for Trump’s monthly reports, there were 23 months when the unemployment rate was 4.1 percent or higher. The results for a difference of means test were statistically significant, by the way.

During the pandemic, the unemployment rate shot up from 4.4 percent in March of 2020 to 14.8 percent in April. It totaled 13.2 percent in May, 11 percent in June, and 10.2 percent in August. The highest unemployment rate during the Biden Administration was 6.4 percent in January of 2021, and he wasn’t even inaugurated until midway through that month. By December of 2021, that unemployment rate was 3.9 percent. Trump inherited a much better economy from Obama than Biden got from Trump.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.