Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz recently appeared on ABC’s “The View” for an interview in which he made a false claim about the labor market under former President Donald Trump. The claim even drew a fact-check from the left-leaning news network CNN, which disputed the validity of the Minnesota Governor’s remarks.
While speaking with the panel of primarily liberal women on “The View,” Walz suggested that Trump had lost historic numbers of manufacturing jobs under his presidency. “Donald Trump lost more manufacturing jobs than any president in American history. That’s simply factual,” Walz said, confident that his claim was legitimate. Notably, the panel did not attempt to fact-check Walz, ostensibly taking his claim at face value.
However, during a recent CNN segment addressing Walz’s comment on manufacturing jobs, analyst Daniel Dale set the record straight, pointing out that Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate said it was “not true.” He said, “Well, if you’re going to say something is simply factual, it should be factual. This is not. It’s not true that the Trump presidency lost more manufacturing jobs than any other presidency.”
Continuing to substantiate his fact-check of Walz, Dale cited manufacturing statistics. “Under George W. Bush, there were about 4.5 million manufacturing jobs lost,” he noted. “Under Trump, it was about 178,000. There are also more manufacturing jobs lost, than under Trump, under Eisenhower, under Ford, under Reagan, so Trump does not have the record.”
Dale also provided an important piece of context to Trump’s economic figures, explaining that the vast majority of job losses occurred at the tail end of his presidency because of the COVID-19 pandemic which shut down the economy. “I think it’s also worth pointing out for context that these Trump job losses in manufacturing overwhelmingly occurred because of the COVID pandemic. Pre-pandemic under Trump, there was a gain of about 414,000 manufacturing jobs,” he said.
Using the same logic, most of the supposed millions of job gains that the Biden-Harris administration boasts occurred because of the gradual reopening of the economy in the early days of President Biden’s term. Instead of legitimate job creation resulting from Biden-Harris policies, many jobs lost from the pandemic simply returned as society returned to normalcy.
Conservatives on social media celebrated the fact-check against Tim Walz that expose the false narrative being touted against Trump as more Americans favor him on the economy than Vice President Harris. Conservative commentator Gunther Eagleman wrote on X, CNN just fact checked Tim Walz and exposed a blatant LIE! He tried to say that Trump “lost more manufacturing jobs than any president in American history.”
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Watch the CNN fact-check below:
However, one user pointed out that, despite the fact-check from CNN, the mainstream media appears to never do so during live interviews. “They never fact check him during interviews. They fact check trump and Vance to their faces but Harris and Walz get fact checked way later when their viewers already are under false impressions,” they wrote in the comments section.
Note: The featured image is a screenshot from the embedded video.