Trump's best economist says he can not explain Trump's false tweet about the economy

The chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Kevin Hassett, said in the White House press room that he did not know how Trump had obtained the wrong information.

"The history of thinking about how mistakes happen is not something I can do because from the initial fact that the president said, I do not know the whole chain of command," he said. Hassett.

"I'm not the chairman of the council of twitter advisors," he added later.

On Monday morning, Trump wrote on Twitter that "the GDP rate (4.2%) is higher than the unemployment rate (3.9%) for the first time in more than 100 years!"

The Washington Post, Fox News, Bloomberg and several other news agencies have published reports indicating that this information is false. This relationship between GDP and the unemployment rate has occurred on many occasions, most recently in the first quarter of 2006, before the financial crisis caused the unemployment rate to rise and economic growth to slow significantly.

It is also not known why Trump focused on this statistic – economists do not generally compare the GDP rate, which measures the pace of economic growth, to the unemployment rate in this way.

Hassett said the correct statement the president should have made is that the GDP growth rate above the unemployment rate has not occurred in 10 years. He said the 100-year statement was a mistake that Hassett himself could not explain.

"What's true is that it's been the highest in 10 years and at one point, someone probably passed it on by adding a zero to that and they should not have done it "said Hassett. "You should speak to the president of the source of the number, but the exact number is 10 years."

Hassett's press conference was largely in favor of Trump's assessment of the economy, and comments on the wrong Twitter post were in response to a question from a reporter.

Trump sometimes publishes fierce economic news that he sees on Fox News in the morning, but Fox News is one of the organizations that called the Twitter message fake.

Trump is frequently accused of spreading false information by critics and even a number of Republicans, but key advisers fervently defend the president, with Trump making loyalty a top goal of his White House. In fact, Trump's top advisors are often proud to have praised Trump.

There was another chance, though, when Hassett tried to fix something Trump had done. Several months ago, Trump published an article on Twitter that seemed to boast about government data that had not been published. This broke the precedent, because the administration has historically avoided weighing on this sensitive information before it was published.

A few weeks later, at an event organized by The Washington Post, Mr. Hassett stated that it was "probably best" that the President does not publish tweets before publishing data like this. .