It’s a familiar pattern for President Trump — another round of positive economic news, obscured by wall-to-wall media coverage of the Russia investigation and the porn star scandal.
Friday should have been one of the best days yet for Mr. Trump’s presidency. The government reported that the unemployment rate in April fell to 3.9 percent, lowest since December 2000.
Black unemployment equaled the record low of 6.6 percent. The jobless rate for adult women was 3.5 percent, lowest in 17 years.
First-quarter after-tax earnings for America’s largest companies are on track to increase 25 percent over the same period last year, thanks largely to the corporate tax cuts that Mr. Trump championed.
Buoyed by the good jobs report, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 332 points on Friday, or 1.39 percent, to close at 24,262. While that’s nearly 10 percent below its record high set on Jan. 26, it’s about 32 percent higher than it was on Election Day in 2016.
“We’re [at] full employment,” the president said. “The big thing to me was cracking 4 [percent]. We’re very proud of it.”
Yet the president and his surrogates spent much of Friday and the weekend trying to put out legal brush fires, including those started by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani’s muddled comments on what and when the president knew about hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who says she had sex with Mr. Trump in 2006.
“I’m not an expert on the facts yet. I’m getting there,” Mr. Giuliani told Judge Jeanine Pirro on Fox News on Saturday night.
Mr. Giuliani also issued a lengthy written clarification Friday stating that the October 2016 payments to Ms. Daniels were a personal matter and not a campaign-finance issue. The clarification seemed to be aimed at cleaning up Mr. Giuliani’s earlier suggestion that Ms. Daniels’ allegation of an affair would have hurt Mr. Trump’s candidacy if she had gone public two weeks before the election.
But his clarification didn’t seem to clear up much. Mr. Giuliani referred to the hush-money payments on Fox News on Saturday night as an “expenditure [that] would have been made whether he [Mr. Trump] was running for president or he wasn’t running for president.”
On CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, host Margaret Brennan then confronted presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway with the assertion that Mr. Giuliani “said [on Fox] that this payment to Stormy Daniels was in fact a campaign expenditure.” That wasn’t, in fact, exactly what he said.
Mrs. Conway replied, “I don’t know why anyone would say that. I would not characterize it that way. The president characterized it as not a campaign expenditure.”
Over at ABC News on Sunday, Mr. Giuliani was trying again. He told host George Stephanopolous that he was not sure when Mr. Trump found out about the $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels.
“It could have been recently, it could have been a while back. Those are the facts that we’re still working on,” he said.
Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti called Mr. Giuliani’s performance “a train wreck.”
“This guy’s all over the map over the last 72 hours on some very simple facts that should be very straightforward,” he said.
A major concern for the president and the GOP, of course, is whether the train wreck or the strong economy will prevail in November’s midterm elections.
Referring to Friday’s good jobs report, GOP pollster Frank Luntz called it “the numbers that will matter most each November.”
Amy Walter, national editor of Cook Political Report, tweeted, “The more media focused on Stormy et al, the more that: 1) Rs rally around POTUS, 2) issues Ds want/need to talk about like health care, can’t break thru.”
Guy Benson, a conservative talk-radio personality and political editor of Townhall.com, said the president has a winning hand with the economy.
“Part of me thinks that it might be a great idea for the president basically to spend most of his time at Mar-a-Lago, do some golfing, watch Fox, you know, tweet a little bit, come out once a month with a giant billboard of economic numbers and just point at it and say, look at these terrific, tremendous numbers, and then go back inside because the economy is booming under President Trump and his policies,” he said on Fox News Sunday.
He added, “I would still recommend that the president spend a lot more time talking about tax reform, talking about these economic numbers because even as we all talk about Stormy Daniels and Robert Mueller and all of those things, the president’s numbers have been ticking up slowly but surely over the last few weeks because most Americans are looking at their bottom lines and smiling.”
The president noted Friday that his job-approval rating in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll reached 51 percent among likely voters, with 49 percent disapproving.
At an economic roundtable discussion Saturday in Cleveland, Ohio, Mr. Trump said his presidency is “going much better than people even understand.”
“The poll numbers are pretty good,” Mr. Trump said. “They actually say that I’m popular. Can you believe it? Of course, the fake news. Fake news! … I get nothing but bad publicity.”
At the invitation-only forum, Sherry Sheely, chief operating officer of Sheely’s Furniture and Appliance in North Lima, Ohio, told the president that his tax cuts are fueling optimism and growth. She said some of her employees cried with happiness upon receiving $1,000 bonuses due to the tax cuts this year.
“I want to encourage you to stay the course,” she told Mr. Trump. “And if you ever have any time of any kind of discouragement, I want you to realize that there’s millions of Americans across this country, like my husband and I, who pray for you, your family, your safety, and your success.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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