Even Trump says he doesn’t know ‘where the hell’ his own false claim about Black unemployment came from | CNN Politics

President Donald Trump uses a lot of fictional statistics. He usually deploys them with a breezy confidence. At an event in Wisconsin on Friday, though, he made a statistical claim that sounded so clearly dubious that he wondered aloud where it had come from. “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,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come — but we’ll take it.” The most recent unemployment rate for Black or African Americans was 6.6% in May, federal statistics show (all unemployment figures in this article are seasonally adjusted). That’s an improvement from the previous rate, 7.3% in April, and from its highest rate during Trump’s second term, 8.2% last November — but it’s not close to a record low. It’s actually higher than the rate Trump inherited when he returned to office. The Black or African American unemployment rate was 6.2% in January 2025, the month of his second inauguration, and 6.1% in December 2024, former President Joe Biden’s last full