Photo by James Yarema on Unsplash
This is what the president of the United States thinks the letter V looks like:
The latest jobs report, released Friday, revealed that despite adding 245,000 jobs in November, the American economy remains 10 million jobs below what it was in February.
But to the outgoing president, this is a miracle, and something worthy of bragging about.
Trump has been calling the economic recovery amid the ongoing and worsening pandemic a “Super V” for months, implying in the process that the United States would climb out of the recession he helped create just as quickly as it fell into it. However, boasting about the shape of a line on a chart over sixty times does not change the reality that the jobs hole the Trump administration has dug for working Americans is still very, very deep, as Catherine Rampell put it in a thread on Twitter this morning.
Here are just a selection of quotes from Trump’s long-running depiction of a reverse square root symbol as a “Super-V”:
“Next year is going to be record setting numbers and you see that when you look at the V. The V is turning out to be true. I was saying a V and everybody was saying a V is impossible but the V, it’s beyond a V, it’s a super V based on the numbers that we have now.” [Trump Minnesota speech, 8/17/20]
“You’ve seen the numbers that they all said we’re not gonna have a V. Well, the way we’re going, we’re gonna have a super V.” [Fox News interview, 8/23/20]
“The country is doing very well, economically. We’re on a ‘V.’ It could even be a super ‘V.’“ [Trump remarks during briefing on the National Hurricane Response Center, 8/27/20]
“This is a super V. You know they said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. V is going to be very hard.’ No, this is a super V.” [Trump, Fayetteville, NC, 9/19/20]
“And you wanna know the truth, probably the reason we’re so strong, we’re coming back stronger than anybody, th — they’re going crazy. This is not a V anymore, it’s a super V. Wait till you see the numbers that are coming out…” [Trump, Lumberton, NC, 10/24/20]
“And then we had to close it up, and understand the disease, and what they’ve done is incredible. The ventilators. All of the things that we did. And then we’re opening it up now, and it’s going to be a Super V. They would say, ‘Oh, it won’t be a V.’ Well, now, 33.1 it’s called a Super V. We’re going to have the best economic year in the history of our country next year.” [Montoursville, PA, 10/31/20]
“We had to close it down. We saved all those lives. And now we opened it — And I said super V, right? I actually said V. Well now I can say it’s a super V.” [Reading, PA, 10/31/20]
“Then we got hit with the plague, but now we’re — we’re bringing it back into — You know, I talked about a V, and the fake news said it won’t happen? It’s a super V! Super V. No, we have a super V. That’s even better. They all said, ‘Oh, it won’t be a V. It’ll be a K. Or it’ll be an S.’ They have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. They want to make it as bad as possible. But it’s a super V, that’s what’s gonna happen.” [Butler, PA, 10/31/20]
“Next year we will be — I think we’re going to have the greatest year economically speaking in the history of our country. You saw the number that just came out, 33.1 GDP, that’s the best number in the history of our country and we’re set. We call it a Super V, we used to say a V, now we’re calling it a Super V. Under my leadership our economy is now growing at the fastest rate ever…” [Dubuque, IA, 11/1/20]
“But we’ve done a great, we’ve done a great job. But how would you like to be shutting down the greatest economy ever? And now we’re building it back up, and we’re, we’re not talking about a V, we’re talking about a super V, based on all of the numbers that you see…” [Rome, GA, 11/1/20]