Why one of Trump’s favorite economic statistics is nearly meaningless

President Donald Trump says not to believe the many polls finding that most Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy. On Friday, to argue that his numbers should be much better, he cited a nearly meaningless fact he portrayed as a major accomplishment.

"I'll see a poll," he said at a rally in South Carolina, "and it'll say, 'Trump is at 44% on the economy.' How can it be at 44? We have more people working now than ever before."

Trump heralded the same fact later in the speech: "Remember when I say, and I'll say it again and again: There are more people working today in the United States of America than at any time in the history of our country." And then, emphasizing the supposed importance of the fact, he repeated it a third time.

It's not clear whether Trump is genuinely unaware this fact is insignificant or whether he is knowingly hyping an insignificant fact for political gain. Regardless, touting the fact "again and again" is unlikely to do anything for his economic approval — because the fact tells us almost nothing about the state of the economy.

The number of people working in the US generally rises over time simply because the population rises over time. With the exception of recessions, like those caused by the financial crisis of 2008 or the Covid-19 crisis of 2020, the number of employed people tends to just get higher as the years pass.

"There are more Americans working because there are more Americans. That's the entire analysis," Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor of public policy and economics, wrote in his newsletter earlier this month.

Every US president since at least 1948, when modern federal data collection began, could have accurately said at some point during their tenure that more people were working in the US than ever before. That clearly isn't because each of these presidents was presiding over a pristine economy.

Other jobs statistics are far more useful

The cost of living , not the state of the labor market, has almost certainly been the key driver of Trump's dismal economic polling this year. But even if you're looking only at jobs, there are much better ways to gauge the situation than the statistic Trump keeps citing. These other metrics show his second-term economy is far from historically strong.

You can look, for example, at the employment-population ratio , which measures the percentage of the population ages 16 and over that is employed. It's down from 60.1% in January 2025, the month of Trump's second inauguration, to 58.9% in July 2026 — lower than it was during the entirety of Joe Biden's last three years as president.