Across an 18-month period, from Jan 2017 to June 2018, jobs in the food and drink sector grew by 5.6 percent.

Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election by promising a return to America’s industrial heyday by turning around aging coal and steel plants and resurrecting a waning economy, but it looks like another sector is thriving during his presidency. It transpires that Trump’s biggest claim to fame has been the steady growth of the service industry. Across an 18-month period, from Jan 2017 to June 2018, jobs in the food and drink sector grew by 5.6 percent—that’s just over twice the rate manufacturing has seen over the same length of time. The steady rise has little to do with the current administration; the same incline happened over the past two presidencies because people’s tendencies towards eating out have got far more to do with restaurant habits than it has to do with newly implemented tariffs or policies.

But none of that news made the president’s Twitter feed. Instead, yesterday, Trump tweeted that for the first time in a century the rate of GDP is now higher than unemployment. Journalist and media outlets immediately jumped on the assertion, and quickly revealed that the benchmark of GDP passing unemployment had been passed many times since it was first breeched in 1948. Bloomberg, one of the many media outlets that were quick to prove the president wrong asked chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Kevin Hassett, at a briefing to shed light on where the boastful yet incorrect figures may have come from: “Hassett said he suspected someone “added a 0” to the fact as it was “conveyed” to the president.”

Back in April Trump also claimed that he had created 3 million jobs since being in office, but when CNBC looked at the numbers again, it transpires that job growth has actually slowed down since the president came to power. Today, CNN revealed that Trump’s ratings had dipped six points—now standing at 36 percent.

The polls paint a winder picture of Trump supporters becoming increasingly despondent with the president’s leadership. When considering the results of other recent approval ratings, the decrease is noticeable across the broad. Fluctuating between one and six points, the overall picture doesn’t look good for the current administration. On average, average, Trump’s approval rating is about 38 percent across eight recent polls. Taking into account variants like sampling errors, CNN said the prognosis looked weary for the midterms: “CNN polling has regularly found that more than 80 percent of voters who approve of Trump are voting for Republican House candidates compared with more than 80 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump voting for Democratic House candidates.”

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