At a speech to the Economic Club of New York today, President Trump declared that his daughter, Ivanka, has personally created 14 million new jobs. The president announced this figure — so astonishingly ludicrous it would embarrass a Stalin-era pronouncement — and then repeated it twice more as the crowd applauded politely.
The entire U.S. economy has created fewer than 6 million new jobs since Trump took office. So Trump is crediting his daughter with having personally created more than 200 percent of all new jobs in the United States. This is like supply-side economics but for authoritarian nepotism.
Exactly how she did this remains a subject of some confusion. The mechanism involves the “Pledge to America’s Workers,” in which the chief executives of various firms promise to create some arbitrary number of training and other opportunities. You can read about this program at its official White House page, but the details are sparse even by the standards of a White House messaging site. There truly does not seem to be any policy here other than Ivanka asking businesspeople to promise to create jobs.
Last October, Ivanka claimed this initiative had created 6.3 million jobs. Lydia DePillis interviewed some of the companies that contributed to this number, and several admitted they had simply credited all real (or, in some cases, hypothetical) job openings to the Ivanka initiative.
Donald Trump touted this initiative in January, insisting, “My daughter has created millions of jobs.” Now it has more than doubled to 14 million. As Trump told his supportive audience, “14 million and going up!” It is almost certainly true that the number of jobs Trump claims his daughter created is going up. By next year, it might exceed the entire workforce.
