Donald Trump made a stop at a restaurant in Iowa on Tuesday, and despite increasingly poor polling numbers on his handling of the economy, he did his best to pretend everything is going well.

“We have great unemployment numbers,” the president said, reality be damned. Moments later, he added that his critics can’t name a single economic metric that has gotten worse since the start of his second term.

“Is there one number that’s bad?” Trump asked rhetorically. “There’s not one.”

There are actually several economic metrics that have gotten worse — public attitudes are not based on nothing — but let’s focus on the most important one: jobs.

I’m mindful of the fact that Trump doesn’t appear to know very much about economic policy or recent history, but White House officials have described him as a “visual learner,” so here’s a chart showing job growth by year since the Great Recession, with red columns representing Republican administrations and blue columns representing Democratic administrations.

That small red column on the right side of the image? That’s 2025, when the U.S. job market added 584,000 jobs for the whole year. That might sound like a decent number until you compare it with recent history: In 2024, when Trump said the economy was terrible, job growth topped 2 million. A year earlier, the total was almost 2.6 million jobs.

In fact, if we exclude 2020 because of the havoc Covid-19 wreaked on the global economy, the first year of Trump’s second term was the worst for job creation since 2009.

What’s more, if we exclude years in which the economy fell into recession, 2025 was the worst year for U.S. jobs since 2003 — despite Trump’s many promises from the 2024 election season about delivering an economic “boom” starting on “Day 1” of his second term.

Given these results, common sense might suggest that the president would ask for Americans’ patience, or perhaps offer evidence of a plan that might turn things around.

Instead, confronted with evidence of his own failures, Trump described the employment data as “great.” A day later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent peddled a similar line during a Fox News appearance, describing the worst U.S. job growth since the Great Recession as “strong.”

We’re left with two possibilities: Either these guys don’t know what “great” and “strong” mean, or the Republican administration is brazenly trying to deceive the public.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.