Even Trump says he doesn’t know ‘where the hell’ his own false claim about Black unemployment came from

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump uses a lot of fictional statistics. He usually deploys them with a breezy confidence.

At an event in Wisconsin on Friday, though, he made a statistical claim that sounded so clearly dubious that he wondered aloud where it had come from.

“And we’ve also had huge drops in — and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done. And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come — but we’ll take it.”

The mystery “stat” isn’t true.

The most recent unemployment rate for Black or African Americans was 6.6% in May, federal statistics show (all unemployment figures in this article are seasonally adjusted). That’s an improvement from the previous rate, 7.3% in April, and from its highest rate during Trump’s second term, 8.2% last November — but it’s not close to a record low.

It’s actually higher than the rate Trump inherited when he returned to office.

The Black or African American unemployment rate was 6.2% in January 2025, the month of his second inauguration, and 6.1% in December 2024, former President Joe Biden’s last full month in office. In fact, the 6.6% rate last month is higher than the rate in each of the last 34 full months of the Biden administration, from March 2022 through December 2024.

The record-low Black or African American unemployment rate — the record at least since the beginning of this federal dataset in the early 1970s — is 4.8%, set under Biden in April 2023. The previous record low, 5.3%, was set during Trump’s first term in August 2019 and September 2019. During Trump’s second term, however, the rate has not been lower than 6%.

And since Trump spoke vaguely of “huge drops,” it’s worth noting that even the 0.7-percentage-point decline in the Black or African American unemployment rate between April 2026 and May 2026, from 7.3% to 6.6%, was not a record month-to-month drop. For example, there was a 0.9-point decline from March 2024 to April 2024 under Biden, from 6.5% to 5.6%. (It’s always wisest to look at multi-month trends rather than one-month changes, which can be statistically volatile, but we’re covering our fact-check bases here.)

It wasn’t clear whether Trump ad-libbed the falsehood or whether he was citing something from his prepared text. The White House has not yet responded to CNN’s requests for an explanation of the claim, sent on Friday night and again on Saturday morning.

Under presidents from both major parties, the unemployment rate for Black or African Americans has been persistently higher than the rates for other racial groups. The overall national unemployment rate was 4.3% in May.

Other false Trump numbers

Trump used other inaccurate and long-debunked supposed statistics at the Wisconsin event on Friday. These were among the ones he didn’t question out loud:

• His repeated claim that “$18 trillion” is being invested in the US. That’s an imaginary figure far higher than the “$10.6 trillion” figure the White House’s own website used as of Saturday for supposed “major investment announcements” during this term – and even the White House figure is a major exaggeration.
• His repeated claim that “25 million” migrants were allowed to enter the country under Biden. This one is also not even close to the truth; through the last full month of the Biden administration, the federal government had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, and that includes millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in the so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total was close to Trump’s number.
• His repeated claim that “the Biden administration had the worst inflation in the history of our country.” (He added that other people “say 49 years, 48 years” rather than in history, but said he still thinks “it was forever.”) Peak Biden-era inflation, 9.1% in June 2022, was the highest in between 40 and 41 years, not 48 years, and nowhere close to the all-time high of 23.7%, which was reached in 1920, or the highest point of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, 14.8%, which was reached in 1980. (And by January 2025, the month Trump was inaugurated, it had fallen to 3%.)

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.