Spicer: Trump Says Formerly ‘Phony’ Jobs Numbers Are Now ‘Very Real’

White House press Secretary Sean Spicer speaks during the daily White House briefing, Monday, Jan. 23, 2017, in the briefing room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
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President Donald Trump, through his spokesperson, said Friday that while he repeatedly called employment numbers “phony” during the presidential campaign, they were “very real now.”

The quip came during a press briefing and hours after the the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers had added 235,000 jobs in February, exceeding expectations. Spicer said on his Twitter account that it was “Great news for American workers,” and “Not a bad way to start day 50 of this administration.”

Trump retweeted a post from the Drudge Report on its Twitter account which read simply: “GREAT AGAIN: +235,000”

“Does the President believe that this jobs report was accurate and a fair way to measure the economy?”

“I talked to the President prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly,” Spicer said. “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

Spicer later responded to reports that he broke a federal rule by responding to the jobs report online within an hour of its release – 22 minutes after it was announced, according to the New York Times.

“So, I apologize if we were a little excited and we were so glad to see so many fellow Americans back to work,” he said.

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Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for sjk sjk says:

    Take me to your litre.

  2. The Trump administration in a nutshell:

    “Oh, c’mon officer, the little girl asked to be raped!”

  3. When I heard the Feb job numbers on NPR this morning, I totally knew this was coming. Amazing that the US went from 40+% unemployment to just 4.7% in just a single month!

    So what’s the spin on the Fed raising interest rates? Because that’s coming in days.

  4. Avatar for leeks leeks says:

    The jobs numbers are just as real as they were last month and the month before. The are also the result of the Obama Administrations actions. They have nothing at all to do with Little Donnie Trump or any of his non-actions.

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