On the 2024 campaign trail, President Trump said he was deeply concerned about the loss of “Black jobs” under his predecessor.
Now that he is back in office, not so much.
While Mr. Trump has for months cheered what he called “record jobs,” he has chosen not to dwell on the persistently high unemployment among a group he courted to secure a second term. The latest unemployment rate for Black workers, released last week, was 6.6 percent in June, remaining the highest of any racial group, even as the national rate dipped slightly.
In two appearances last month, Mr. Trump painted a rosy picture of the economic outlook for Black Americans, who have been disproportionately affected by many of his policies. Asked during a June 4 Oval Office event for a response to the disparity in the Black unemployment rate compared to other groups, Mr. Trump responded by listing a number of countries that he was “bringing cars back from.” He then offered a reason for Black workers to have hope: factories.
“It’s all coming back. It’s amazing,” the president said. “And where your Black worker is really going to do well is when those factories open. So, I think they’re going to be great. We’ve, we’ve been doing well. It’s been a big focus for me.”
During a speech to farmers in Wisconsin the next day, Mr. Trump celebrated the most recent jobs report, and falsely claimed that the Black unemployment rate was at a historic low.
“I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Mr. Trump said. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it. I don’t know where the hell that stat came — but we’ll take it.”
Black unemployment reached a record low of 5.3 percent during Mr. Trump’s first term, which at the time was the lowest recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but that record was shattered by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2023, when it fell to 4.8 percent.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, the rate has increased since he was sworn into office in January 2025, when it was 6.2 percent. It has not fallen below 6 percent since then, and peaked at 8 percent last fall.
Over the course of his second term, Mr. Trump’s policies have taken a uniquely harmful toll on Black Americans. He slashed the federal work force, which dismantled a longstanding ladder to the middle class for Black Americans, and gutted civil rights-era policies that have helped address systemic discrimination.
Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, said Mr. Trump’s most recent statements about Black Americans’ job prospects aligned with how he has often characterized Black people. “It is both racist and demeaning to suggest the only jobs that Blacks will be available for will be blue-collar jobs and factories,” Mr. Johnson said.
The White House did not say why Mr. Trump believed that factory jobs would specifically benefit Black workers, and an official denied that Mr. Trump’s comment was racially motivated. The administration also did not respond to a question about the statistic Mr. Trump cited in his false claim about Black unemployment.
Allison Schuster, a White House spokeswoman, insisted that Mr. Trump “has done more for Black Americans than any other president in recent history.” She pointed to policies in his first term, which included the previous record low for the Black unemployment rate, the creation of “opportunity zones” in distressed housing communities, and the long-term funding for historically Black colleges and universities.
“The second Trump administration is building on those tremendous successes by making our communities safe and beautiful, stopping the flow of illegal migrants who were undermining American workers, signing the largest working-class tax cut in American history, and putting American children on a path toward generational wealth through Trump accounts,” Ms. Schuster said.
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on issues affecting Black Americans, said the numbers were cause for alarm. “If the national unemployment rate was this high, people would be talking recession,” Mr. Asante-Muhammad said, “but for Black America that’s normalized, which is problematic.”
The most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the 6.6 percent rate did not budge from May, when it fell from 7.3 percent in April. But it is still significantly higher than the national rate of 4.2 percent and the 3.6 percent for white people. A Washington Post analysis found that in the first half of 2026, the average gap between white and Black unemployment was about 11 percent larger than the same period last year.
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said the jobs report “reinforces that the American labor market remains solid thanks to President Trump’s economic agenda.”
While Mr. Trump has claimed that the Black unemployment rate is a “focus” for him, he does not speak about it often, after a campaign in which he emphasized the issue and said migrants were taking jobs that should go to Black people. “They’re taking Black jobs now, and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people,” he declared in a June 2024 debate against Mr. Biden.
Three days before clinching the election, he said: “Migrants coming in illegally have taken African American jobs. People that have done a great job, they’ve worked there for 20, 25 years in different places.”
Katica Roy, an economist, said Mr. Trump’s celebration of the overall numbers overlooked the dire situation for Black Americans, who have historically signaled the health of the economy.
“The headline economy looks stable only because the averages are hiding who is being pushed out of opportunity,” Ms. Roy said. “When growth bypasses the very workers who have historically functioned as the economy’s bellwether, we are not measuring resilience; we are masking fragility.”
