Your president loves to get on the internet and brag about stuff he hasn’t actually accomplished. He is so abhorrently clueless, he doesn’t even realize how obvious it is to the American people when he is making things up and talking out of his ass.
Such was the case early Tuesday morning when Donald Trump got up to brag on Twitter about how much lower unemployment is for black Americans and how his approval ratings among black Americans had doubled.
“Unemployment for Black Americans is the lowest ever recorded. Trump approval ratings with Black Americans has doubled. Thank you, and it will get even (much) better! @FoxNews,” he (or somebody) wrote on his official Twitter account.
First of all:
I’m going to need Trump to stop getting all of his information from Breitbart and Fox News. That’s where he is going wrong.
As the Washington Post points out, when Breitbart’s Neil Munro declared on Sunday that “Trump’s support among blacks has doubled since 2016, amid racism claims,” he incorrectly compared vote share and approval ratings, which are two different things.
He also inaccurately calculated an average of the approval ratings of black men and black women, saying that a 23 percent approval from black men and an 11 percent approval from black women “averaged out to 17 percent, or twice the 8 percent score he was given in the 2016 exit polls.”
From the Washington Post:
You can’t just “average” the values from men and women, because they may not make up an even portion of the population. Nor can you then compare that average—which evaluates how people view Trump’s performance as president—to how those groups voted—an evaluation of whom people liked better as a candidate, Trump or Hillary Clinton. Trump’s overall approval rating is consistently lower than his vote share because a lot of people liked him a bit better than Clinton as a candidate but think he’s doing a bad job in office.
On Tuesday morning’s Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade made the same type of error. The hosts of the show were discussing a survey that showed that most of the coverage of Trump’s presidency in 2017 was negative.
Referencing a poll SurveyMonkey conducted over the course of 2017 in which it interviewed 605,172 Americans, Kilmeade said, “Believe it or not, through all this negative coverage, they did a survey of 600,000 people about how black America views this president. His numbers have actually doubled in approval. It’s still low, it’s around 25 percent, but it’s doubled since the election.”
Kilmeade seemed to think the pollsters surveyed 600,000 black Americans. They didn’t. Further, a Gallup poll shows that Trump’s approval rating among blacks fell 9 points from January to December, going from 15 percent to 6 percent.
This means that Trump’s approval rating among black Americans has actually been cut more than in half.
And as for those unemployment numbers?
As the Post reports, it’s true that the unemployment rate for black Americans is low, but that’s not something Trump can take credit for. The rate has been steadily declining since 2010, as have rates for whites and Hispanics, as well.
So no, Donald Trump. Black people don’t like you. You haven’t done anything for us. Your administration continues to push forward policies that will disproportionately negatively impact us.
You don’t care about us, and you never have. Now you just want to use us as a prop to try to make yourself look good.
Do us all a favor: Shut your fucking shithole.
Read more at the Washington Post.