On Night 1 of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) left out critical context when bashing former President Donald Trump for purportedly presiding over a record number of job losses.
"He lost millions of jobs in America," the Illinois Democrat senator said, adding: "He is one of only two presidents in the history of the United States to leave office with fewer Americans working than when he started."
Senator Dick Durbin mocks Trump on his jobs record as President.#DNC #Trump pic.twitter.com/YWruzQBRjg
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) August 20, 2024
Durbin failed to mention that losses of that magnitude only occurred on account of the COVID-19 pandemic that decimated the U.S. economy.
Prior to the pandemic, Trump saw 6.7 million jobs gained in the first three years of his term between January 2017 and February 2020, before the state-mandated coronavirus shutdowns left him with a labor force ordered to stay home or out of a job altogether.
Durbin further claimed that by comparison, the U.S. economy gained 16 million jobs under President Joe Biden.
Though 15.8 million jobs technically spawned after Biden entered office in January 2021, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics timeline, there should be an asterisk attached to this statistic; many of those were jobs actually added back to America's beleaguered economy, which had suddenly lost more than 10 million jobs between March and April 2020, as the U.S. Department of Labor reported.
This jobs creation claim, which Biden himself regularly repeats, doesn't calculate net gain and conflates the generation of new jobs with the natural return of the workforce.
In fact, the jobs recovery process started during Trump's time, but because his tenure ended only eight months into the economic-revival cycle, much of the job "gains" accrued under the Biden administration when workers were naturally returning to work.
Economic experts say that Biden, despite doing nothing as jobs were beginning to bounce back, greatly benefited from the waning of the pandemic's effects on the now-reopened economy and the rehiring of American workers.
"This is literally evidence that Biden was handed something on a golden platter," American Action Forum's president Douglas Holtz-Eakin told PolitiFact. "This recovery from a deep recession would have happened no matter who was president."
Left-leaning Urban Institute's economics analyst John Buhl told Check Your Fact that a hefty portion of Biden's job performance is attributable to the pandemic ending, specifically "a very, very, very, large chunk. Probably at least 90% maybe more than that."
So, Biden didn't exactly inherit a broken economy from his predecessor. The economy was in the midst of healing, steadily recouping what was lost at a relatively rapid rate, and well underway when Biden was inaugurated.
Similarly, when Biden took the stage, he cherry-picked data to claim that he created 800,000 "new" manufacturing jobs. "American manufacturing is back," Biden declared during his farewell speech. "Where are those who say we wouldn't lead the world in manufacturing?"
Although it's true that that number increased by over 765,000 from January 2021 to July 2024, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, again, they're not "new" jobs. Pandemic-related layoffs significantly impacted the industry. Last year, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that about 1.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost as a result of the pandemic.