What Happened to All the Jobs Trump Promised?
President Donald Trump likes to claim credit for the American job boom. He’s not the only president to celebrate job creation under his watch, but Trump is unusual among his peers for frequently attributing specific jobs at specific companies to his own actions.
The U.S. economy has been producing jobs at a healthy clip for years, creating 188,542 jobs a month on average in the first 24 months of Trump’s presidency, compared with 202,417 jobs a month in the last 24 months of the Obama administration.
But how much credit does Trump deserve? We tracked the president’s tweets and speeches about job creation to try to figure out how well his claims stacked up. The answer is: Not well.
Scroll to Start ↓
Since the election, Trump has made 35 claims that companies would create 8.9 million jobs in the U.S. thanks to his policies and actions. Some of the new jobs he touted failed to materialize. Many of the new jobs he took credit for were, in fact, planned before he took office.
We found that only about 154,000 of those jobs have been created so far.
Roughly 122,000 of those were genuinely new positions, as opposed to slots that were planned before the presidential election.
The bottom line: Only 797 jobs are attributable to Trump, according to the companies that did the hiring. That figure is so small it represents less than even one person in this graphic.
Take Trump’s claim in February that his daughter Ivanka created “millions of jobs” through the Pledge to America’s Workers, a White House initiative to encourage professional development for workers across different industries. Trump later provided a more specific number: “Think of it: 6.5 million. And these are jobs that, for the most part, would not have happened.”
But the “opportunities” pledged, which later went up to 7.9 million from over 200 companies, are, in fact, opportunities for retraining and continuing education, not necessarily new jobs.
Just before Trump took office, Alibaba chief Jack Ma stood with the president-elect and promised 1 million U.S. jobs.
But Ma later rescinded that commitment. “The promise was made on the premise of friendly U.S.-China partnership,” Ma said in an interview with Chinese media. “That premise no longer exists today.” In any case, the Chinese e-commerce giant wasn’t planning to build facilities or hire coders in the U.S. The plan all along was to create 1 million indirect jobs by helping American companies sell goods to the Chinese market on its platforms.
Explore these claims for yourself. The promises are organized in chronological order. We confirmed all figures with company representatives and presented the results to the White House, which did not respond to our request for comment.