What Happened?

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump tweeted facts about “black Americans” that many critics and publications claim are false.

Trump went on his favorite social media platform on Tuesday where he said, “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!”

He apparently credited the cable news show “Fox & Friends” for their Tuesday broadcast where co-host Brian 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.”

According to The New York Times, the survey was through the San Mateo-based internet platform called SurveyMonkey. According to Kilmeade, 602,134 interviews with adults of every race group were done through the Bay Area business.

The New York Times obtained the results of those interviews from SurveyMonkey and the publication found that Trump’s approval rating among Black Americans declined from 20 percent in Feb. 2017, to 15 percent in Dec. 2017. These reports are consistent with the numbers two more credible sources found on Trump, Pew Research Center and Reuters.

Last week, The Atlantic used the SurveyMonkey statistics to report that 23 percent of Black men and 11 percent of Black women approved of Trump’s performance. However, the publication failed to mention that of the 602,134 interviews conducted, approximately just 19,000 of them were Black men and just about 31,000 were Black women.

The Atlantic partly credited the lowest unemployment rate for Black Americans since 1972 for the increased approval rating, however, according to The New York Times, “The 6.8 percent unemployment rate for black Americans in December is indeed the lowest since 1972, according to the latest monthly data that is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the rate has been in decline for several years, decreasing steadily from 16.4 percent in August 2011 to 7.8 percent in January 2017.”