After President Donald Trump tweeted the false claim that the United States' Gross Domestic Product was higher than the unemployment rate for the first time in over a century, Kevin Hassett, the White House Chief Economic Advisor took to the podium to walk back the president's statements.
It was an awkward exchange.
When a journalist asked Hassett why Trump made claims that were "just not true," Hassett responded, "I can tell you what is true," which was inadvertently met with laughter from reporters.
Hassett continued:
Let me just say, the history of thought of how errors happen is not something i can engage in, because from the initial fact to what the president said, that I don't know the whole chain of command, but what is true is that it's the highest in 10 years, and at some point somebody probably conveyed it to him, adding a zero and they shouldn't have done that."
The statement wasn't exactly well received.
To Hassett's credit, he did make one statement rarely heard from Trump advisors:
When the press finds mistakes...We don't like making them but we are grateful to have them pointed out because we want to correct them."
The economy is a sensitive subject for the Trump White House. On one hand, job growth and a stable economy has been the main talking point of an administration that, at times, seems barely able to stay afloat. Yet those within it, especially Donald Trump, can't admit that it's largely due to the previous president, often leading the administration to misrepresent the origins of the progress made during Obama's and Trump's tenures.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently touted wildly innaccurate job growth numbers, claiming that Donald Trump created more jobs in his two years as president than Obama managed to do in eight. While Sanders asserted that Obama's total job creation was around 700,000 when in actuality, it was over three million.
Trump was also irked at a recent speech given by Obama at the University of Illinois, in which Obama reminded the crowd that the economy Trump so often touts was majorly due to him.
Trump took to Twitter, retweeting his supporters in an effort to blast the claim.
It's unclear whether or not Obama's economy will stay afloat in Trump's White House long enough to be a talking point of the 2020 campaign.
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