Donald Trump loves fake numbers. He spits them out like cheap confetti. Usually, he does it with a straight face. But during a Friday campaign stop in Wisconsin, even the master of make-believe had to pause. He served up a statistic so blatantly absurd that he actually questioned his own script.
“African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump boasted to the crowd. Then came the quiet part out loud. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it. I don’t know where the hell that stat come — but we’ll take it.”
He shouldn’t take it. It is flat-out wrong.
Let’s look at the actual data. In May, Black unemployment sat at 6.6%. Sure, it is a slight drop from April’s 7.3%. But a historic low? Not even close. In fact, Trump inherited a better economy than the one he is currently bragging about. When he took the oath of office in January 2025, the rate was 6.2%. The month before that, under Joe Biden, it was 6.1%. For nearly three years under the previous administration—34 consecutive months, to be exact—Black unemployment was lower than the 6.6% Trump is currently celebrating.
The real record is 4.8%. Biden’s team hit that milestone in April 2023. Trump’s personal best was 5.3% back in late 2019. During this second term, he hasn’t even cracked the 6% floor. Even his “huge drop” of 0.7 percentage points last month is nothing to write home about. Biden saw a 0.9-point drop in a single month back in 2024. Single-month jumps are volatile anyway. They are noise.
Was it an ad-lib? Or did some staffer write this fantasy into his teleprompter? The White House isn’t talking. They ignored multiple requests for clarification. Meanwhile, systemic gaps persist. Black unemployment remains stubbornly higher than the national average, which sat at 4.3% in May.
But Trump wasn’t done. The Wisconsin rally was a buffet of fabricated data. He just didn’t question the rest of it.
Take his claim of “$18 trillion” in US investments. It is a massive hallucination. Even his own administration’s website only claims $10.6 trillion—and that number is already heavily padded.
Then there is the border. Trump claimed 25 million migrants entered under Biden. The real number of border encounters was under 11 million, and that includes millions who were immediately kicked out. Toss in the estimated 2.2 million “gotaways,” and you still do not get anywhere near his imaginary 25 million.
Finally, he resurrected the old ghost of “the worst inflation in history.” It is a lie. Biden-era inflation peaked at 9.1% in 2022. That was a four-decade high, yes, but nowhere near the 23.7% peak of 1920 or Jimmy Carter’s 14.8% in 1980. By the time Trump took office again, it had already cooled to 3%.
But facts are boring. Fiction sells tickets.
