TRUMP ENDS HIS TERM LIKE MANY AMERICANS: OUT OF A JOB

The final employment scorecard delivered during President Donald Trump’s administration handed the Republican a mantle no politician would envy: He will be the only modern president to leave office with fewer US jobs than when his term began, Dan Burns reported for Reuters.

A global pandemic that Trump - who lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Joe Biden in November - was late to recognize and prone to downplay or outright deny through much of its course laid waste to the US economy in the final year of his term.

It erased all semblance of the booming job market that he had hoped would vault him to a second term.

Instead, as the Labor Department reported on Friday, total US employment fell in December by 140,000 to 142.6 million, roughly 10 million fewer jobs than before the coronavirus pandemic struck.

The economic record books will count January’s employment figures in Trump’s column since he leaves office near the end of the month on Jan. 20.

This month’s data will be reported in early February.

But there is no realistic expectation that payrolls will rebound enough to close the gap of roughly 3 million jobs between December’s level and that of January 2017, when Trump took office.

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