Trump 2020 adviser, Bruce Levell, refused to give former president Obama, credit for lowering black unemployment on MSNBC last week.
Levell got into a heated exchange with host Alex Hill, after she questioned President Donald Trump’s claim that his administration helped bring black unemployment to a historic low. Hill provided Levell with a chart that showed the start of the decline, during the Obama era, and asked him to explain why Obama does not deserve the credit.
“This chart will show you that it has been on a very regular and significant decline for the last, what, seven years since President Obama took office,” said Hill. “How is it that President Trump takes credit for it?”
Disregarding the data, Levell stuck to his guns, and sang Trump’s praises. He even evoked one of Obama’s famous slogans.
"The numbers speak for themselves, but what I’m trying to tell you is that you have a leader here in the Oval Office who’s putting out this cheer and putting out this euphoria of ‘Yes We Can,’" Levell said. “That spills over into our American democracy that people want to make a better change. So, he gets the credit for this! We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward.”
The Trump surrogate then went onto blame President Obama for "$9 trillion of debt."
Trump has taken credit for lowering black unemployment via Twitter, and during his State of the Union address.
Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2018
Not long after the president began using the black unemployment rate as a talking point, the Bureau of Labor released a report that found the rate spiked in January 2018.
When asked how the Trump administration had helped black unemployment, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders took the all lives matter approach, saying the GOP's recent tax reforms would help “all Americans.”
