‘I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it’: Trump’s claim of record-low Black unemployment isn’t true, fact-check finds

President Donald Trump recently made a claim about Black unemployment numbers that even he seemed to doubt. Speaking at an event in Wisconsin, he said, “And we’ve also had huge drops in – and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done. And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it. I don’t know where the hell that stat come, but we’ll take it.”

CNN points out that his doubt turned out to be well-founded, because the claim is not true. Federal data shows the unemployment rate for Black or African Americans was 6.6% in May 2026. That was an improvement from April 2026, when the rate was 7.3%, and better than the 8.2% seen in November 2025.

But 6.6% is nowhere near a record low. The current figure is actually higher than the rate Trump inherited when he began his second term. In January 2025, the rate was 6.2%, and it sat at 6.1% in December 2024.

The federal record low predates Trump’s second term by years

Looking at the last 34 full months of the previous administration, from March 2022 through December 2024, the rate stayed lower than the 6.6% reported last month. The actual record-low unemployment rate for Black or African Americans, since the federal government began tracking this data in the early 1970s, is 4.8%, which happened in April 2023, as per CNN.

During Trump’s first term, the lowest rate reached was 5.3% in August and September 2019. Since the start of his second term, the rate has not dropped below 6%. Even the recent monthly decline, which Trump called a huge drop, does not hold up as a record. A 0.7-percentage-point decline happened between April 2026 and May 2026, but there was a 0.9-point decline between March 2024 and April 2024.

It remains unclear whether this falsehood was an off-the-cuff remark or pulled directly from prepared text. The White House has not yet explained where the claim came from. Trump has made other staffing and policy moves in recent weeks, including his push to fire ODNI employees.

Beyond this unemployment figure, Trump repeated several other inaccurate statistics at the Wisconsin event that he did not question. One was the claim that 18 trillion dollars is being invested in the United States. 

This number is much higher than the 10.6 trillion dollars figure currently listed on the White House website for investment announcements, and even that official number is a major exaggeration, another CNN fact-check found.

He also brought up his claim that 25 million migrants were allowed to enter the country under the previous administration. According to official U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, there were fewer than 11 million encounters during that time, a figure that includes many people who were expelled. Even accounting for the estimated 2.2 million people who may have evaded detection, the total remains nowhere near 25 million.

Finally, he repeated the claim that the previous administration had the worst inflation in the history of the country. Peak inflation during that time reached 9.1% in June 2022, the highest rate in about 40 to 41 years, but it does not compare to the all-time high of 23.7% reached in 1920. By the time Trump took office in January 2025, that inflation rate had already fallen to 3%. The Wisconsin remarks follow other recent public appearances, including an energy event where Trump appeared to doze off.