An attempt to counter Fake News

President Trump, this past Monday morning in a tweet, chastised “fake news media” for not covering the nation’s progress in some major areas:

“At some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy, success with ISIS, the border & so much else!”

Not wanting to be counted in that category, here’s a column discussing each of those topics.

You decide if there’s progress.

According to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the four months from February through May (Trump was inaugurated in late January), a total of 594,000 net new jobs were created in the United States.

In the final four months of President’s Obama’s administration, that total was 659,000.

But some would argue that it’s not fair to compare February through May with the four-month period from October to January, since the Christmas season is likely to have more job growth.

OK — from February through May in 2016, the nation saw net new job creation of 658,000 new jobs.

At the current pace, the U.S. for 2017 would see its slowest job creation rate in the past seven years.

But, Trump boasts, unemployment in May dropped from 4.8 percent to 4.3 percent: “ ... unemployment at lowest level in years,” he tweeted Sunday evening.

The problem is that in May, 429,000 people dropped out of the labor market and were no longer seeking jobs. That was the chief factor in the unemployment decline.

Last August during the presidential campaign, Trump called that month’s 4.9 percent jobless rate “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics” because it didn’t take into account the number of labor force dropouts.

How about the economy?

Mixed bag.

For the first quarter of 2017 (the latest figures available), existing housing prices were up 4.0 percent, consumer credit was up 4.8 percent, and Fortune 500 companies reported profit gains of more than 10 percent for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2011. And the stock market is at an all-time high.

But commercial and industrial loan volume is down. The gross domestic product for the first quarter rose at an annualized rate of only 0.7 percent, a fraction of the 3.0 percent pace the Trump administration claims it can achieve.

Trump supporters and detractors can each put their own spin on the economic picture.

What about the war on ISIS?

The U.S.-backed coalition is doing pretty well against ISIS fighters.

For civilians in the war zone, the news isn’t so good.

As of Tuesday, ISIS troops were pushed back to less than a square half-mile of the city of Mosul after nine months of the military campaign by Iraqi fighters backed by the U.S.-led coalition. In addition, the ISIS caliphate’s “capital” of Raqqa in Syria is under assault by coalition troops, who have breached the city walls and are engaged in heavy fighting.

It appears to be only a matter of time before the coalition wrests complete control from ISIS in both cities, a development that will leave only mop-up work before Iraq and Syria are essentially free of the Islamic State.

But it’s not without human cost.

Just this past Tuesday morning, a coalition airstrike on an ISIS complex in eastern Syria reportedly killed 57 people in an ISIS-held jail, most of them civilians who had been imprisoned there by ISIS. The death toll from the attack is expected to rise.

It was another in a series of incidents in which civilians have been killed, maimed or displaced by U.S.-backed assaults. There’s been a dramatic increase in civilian deaths from U.S. and coalition airstrikes since the first of the year.

U.S. officials say there has been no change in the rules of engagement for American forces operating in Syria and Iraq, but they add that higher civilian casualties were expected as ISIS forces are forced into tighter boundaries. In addition, ISIS has been using civilians as human shields to slow the coalition advance.

How about the border?

In March, President Trump claimed that since his election, illegal border crossing had dropped by 61 percent. PolitiFact rates that statement as “mostly true.”    

Last November, apprehensions of people making illegal attempts to cross the Mexican border totaled 47,210. In February, that total dropped to 18,762.

The number of illegal crossings had spiked late last fall after Trump’s election, authorities reason, because it was evident the newly-elected president would beef up border security when he took office in January.

And Mexico may have taken more serious steps to prevent illegal border crossings from its own side.

Whether the northward flow of illegal immigration will slow permanently is an open question. The high crime rate in Central America, including gangs and drugs, has driven citizens of those countries to seek safety in the United States for years, and those conditions don’t show signs of slowing.

I’ll await word from the president on whether this column meets his standard for Fake News.

I’ll let you know.

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