(Reuters) – The last job scoring card delivered during President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday gave the Republican a cloak that no politician would envy: he will be the only modern president to step down with fewer jobs in the US than when his term began.
A global pandemic that Trump – who lost his candidacy for re-election to Democrat Joe Biden in November – was slow to recognize and openly deny or deny for much of his course devastated the U.S. economy in the last year of his term. This erased the entire appearance of the expanding job market that he hoped would take him to a second term.
Instead, as the Department of Labor reported on Friday, total employment in the United States fell in December by 140,000 to 142.6 million, about 10 million fewer jobs than before the coronavirus pandemic.
The economic record books will count the January job numbers in Trump’s column, since he left office near the end of the month on January 20. This month’s data will be released in early February.
But there is no realistic expectation that the payroll will recover sufficiently to close the gap of around 3 million jobs between the December and January 2017 levels, when Trump took office.
Chart: Trump’s job market: Boom to burst in a year,
Trump’s last year in office was punctuated by economic superlatives, effectively all brought about by COVID-19 and the wave of restrictions on business and activities imposed to try to contain its rapid and deadly spread.
The outbreak – which has already infected nearly 21.5 million residents in the United States and killed more than 365,000 – triggered the fastest and deepest recession of the post-World War II era.
The unemployment rate skyrocketed from a half-century low from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.8% in just two months, with more than 22 million people unemployed. Although it has since dropped to 6.7%, it is 2 percentage points higher than when he took office.
On that front, at least, Trump has company: he is the third consecutive Republican president to step down with a higher unemployment rate than in his inauguration. Both President George W. Bush and President George HW Bush oversaw rising unemployment rates during their terms.
Graph: Trump’s job market: Unemployment has increased,
During his first three years in office, Trump often pointed to improving the job market for blacks in improvised speeches, claiming that no other American president had done so much to improve the situation for African Americans.
Some data confirm this. The black unemployment rate at the end of 2019 fell to 5.2% – the lowest since the Labor Department started monitoring it. That was still almost 2 points higher than the white rate.
In December 2019, employment levels for blacks across the country rose 8.1% from what they were when Democrat Barack Obama – the first black president and Trump’s predecessor – stepped down. In contrast, employment growth in this period for whites was 3.3% – albeit on a much larger basis.
But COVID-19 eliminated all of those gains, and while employment levels for blacks approached where they were at the beginning of Trump’s term, levels for blacks and whites remain below that.
Graph: Trump’s job market: black and white,
Trump took office promising a revival of manufacturing as part of his first American agenda, under which he protested imported goods and companies that sent factories abroad.
There was some modest improvement in its first three years, with total employment in the industry growing by 3.8%. But other sectors – especially services – have been responsible for most of the job gains so far.
And it was in the service sector that COVID-19 struck its hardest.
Jobs in the leisure and hospitality industries, in particular, have suffered from measures to prevent the spread of the disease, and the latest outbreak of infections has brought back pain in the industry. While 140,000 jobs were lost last month, almost 500,000 were laid off in leisure, leisure and hospitality, and total employment in the sector is 18.5% less than when Trump took the oath of office.
What about manufacturing? There are 60,000 fewer factory jobs today than in January 2017.
Graph: Trump’s job market: wide variation by sector,
Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Cynthia Osterman