House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn pushed back against claims of record-low unemployment for black Americans under the Trump administration with a reference to slavery.
The South Carolina Democrat joined Fox News’s Neil Cavuto on Tuesday to discuss jobs, the 2020 election, and if President Trump “delivered the goods for a lot of African Americans.”
“I’m saying that the African American unemployment is not the lowest it’s ever been unless you count slavery,” Clyburn said. “We were fully employed during slavery. So this all depends on how you measure this up.”
Clyburn told Cavuto that the current economic climate, which has hit the lowest average unemployment rate in recorded history, is thriving because Democrats “laid the foundation for [it] back in 2009.”
Earlier in the segment, Cavuto pressed Clyburn on whether he would support former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for president, despite his resurfaced comments on minorities.
“I’m going to back whoever our nominee is. Absolutely,” he said.
Remarks resurfaced this week of Bloomberg saying that black and Latino men “don’t know how to behave” at work. Leaked audio from a 2015 event also showed him defending stop and frisk while acknowledging that the policy disproportionately affected minorities.
Clyburn reiterated that Bloomberg’s remarks on minorities don’t bother him as much as what “Trump has said about African Americans.”
“Any time that I go to the polls, I’m considering positives and negatives on all candidates. And I try to go with the one whose positives outweigh the negatives,” he said.
