MITCHELL: “Let’s talk about the jobs report, better than expected, the president is touting it, and he seems to be trying to reboot his campaign as he was in the Rose Garden speaking for 40 minutes nonstop about this jobs report as the greatest ever. What is your approach to the jobs report today? Are we back on a better trajectory?”
PEREZ: “The greatest ever, talk about an inaccurate statement. You know, over the last three months, Andrea, we have seen 19.6 million jobs lost over the last three months. To give you a perspective, Andrea, in the worst three-month of the Obama administration, the worst three-month period, we had 3.2 million jobs loss. Every president since FDR has seen net job growth in their presidency until now with Donald Trump.” [crosstalk]
MITCHELL: “Excuse me, in fairness, there was a pandemic. But let me just say in fairness, there was a pandemic, which caused a complete shutdown of the economy. Now it’s not the greatest jobs ever, but the fact is it’s coming back from a flat line.”
PEREZ: “But the reality, Andrea, is it didn’t have to be this way. What we know is that last December, last January, last February, this president was asleep at the switch. When he should have been acting, when he should have been listening to his experts, he instead was negotiating a trade deal with China. He wanted to get that trade deal. It was a crappy trade deal he got. And so here we are now. It has exacerbated the extent of the job loss. And so, and as the vice president will talk about, the extent of the job loss hits harder in communities of color. The African-American unemployment rate, as you correctly pointed out, went up. At the end of the Obama administration, the African-American unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. Now it’s more than double. The Hispanic unemployment rate is roughly triple what it was at the end of the Obama administration. You look at all of these. You look at the racial disparities in the COVID-19 deaths. You look at what’s happened with George Floyd and all of the unrest. I mean, I think James Mattis hit the nail on the head when he said, you know, I have never seen a president in my lifetime who doesn’t want to unite. We need a uniter-in-chief at the moment. We need a consoler-in-chief at the moment. We are in a crisis, a real crisis. This is like — this jobs report, I want people to get their jobs back. This is like saying, we were 42 points behind in the football game. Now we’re 35 points behind. And he wants to spike the football for being 35 points behind. We’re in a crisis, Andrea and we need a president this November who can do crisis management, who has the experience, the temperament and the character to unite our nation, to lead our nation, to make sure that zip code never determines destiny, to make sure we don’t play this us against them games that this president plays. Look what he said today about George Floyd. I bet George Floyd would be very happy looking down today. George Floyd is dead. He was murdered by police officers. We’ve had rioting because we’ve had people who are so angry, we’re going to temper that anger and we’re going to channel that anger into voting success, Andrea, in November. Just like Ella Jones did this week in Ferguson, Missouri, becoming the first woman, the first African-American to become the mayor of Ferguson, Missouri. And now they have a majority African-American city council. That’s what we have to. But, I’ll tell you, we have three crises right now; a crisis of our democracy, a crisis in our economy, a public health crisis, and we need leadership that can do crisis management. You are about to hear from the next president of the United States because he is that steady hand at the tiller that we need.”