Fact Check: Kamala Harris Distorts Unemployment Figures to Attack Trump

CLAIM: Kamala Harris said: “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”

VERDICT: FALSE. Unemployment was 6.4% in January 2021, not far from full employment, when Trump left office.

Vice President Harris attacked former President Trump’s economic record at the presidential debate on Tuesday night by claiming that he “left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” That is simply false.

In January 2021, unemployment was 6.4%, lower than it was in 2014, when President Barack Obama was in office. In fact, the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression was under Obama, at 10.0% in the early part of his administration.

It is true that unemployment spiked to 14.8% in April 2020, but that was because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, which were imposed at both the state and federal levels, and kept in place longer by Democrats than Republicans.

Moreover, the coronavirus recession was the shortest in history, lasting just two months. Trump could arguably claim that his policies — including massive emergency infusions of federal support to the economy — were responsible for jump-starting the recovery.

When Harris and President Joe Biden took office, they inherited an economy that was already recovering.

The one change that Harris and Biden added was inflation, triggered by massive spending in the America Recovery Plan Act, which added trillions of dollars to the economy on top of trillions still waiting to be spent.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.