Stated another way, during the 70 years since the government has tracked growth and unemployment, the real GDP growth rate has been higher than the jobless rate more than 20 percent of the time.
At a briefing with reporters Monday, Kevin Hassett, chairman of Trump's Council of Economic Advisors, conceded that Trump's claim was not true.
"From the initial fact to what the president said … I don't know the whole chain of command," he said. "What is true it is that it's the highest in 10 years. At some point somebody probably conveyed it to him adding a zero to that, and they shouldn't have done that."
The last time was in the first quarter of 2006, when unemployment was about 4.7 percent and quarterly GDP growth was 5.4 percent, government data show.
It's not the first time the White House has touted economic statistics that aren't accurate.
Last month, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders falsely claimed that Trump has created three times as many jobs for black workers as his predecessor, President Barack Obama, did during his entire time in office.
"This president since he took office ... in the year and a half that he's been here has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans," Sanders told reporters Aug. 14. "After eight years of President Obama in office, he only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans. President Trump in his first year and a half has already tripled what President Obama did in eight years."
But according to the official count from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the employment gains for black people since the Great Recession occurred during the Obama administration.
During the eight years Obama was in office, black employment rose by roughly 3.2 million, or more than four times the 700,000 jobs added so far since Trump took office.
