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VELSHI: “All right, President Trump mentioned that the Dow is about 22,000. You see that in the bottom corner of your screen. We never covered that before today until he tweeted that mainstream media doesn’t cover the Dow. I don’t know what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years of my career.”
RUHLE: “So much sass.”
VELSHI: “We’re going to talk to Peter Alexander about that in a second, but that stuff that President Trump just came back to say, we need to put this to rest. He’s been saying this all the time. If anybody who has anything to do with President Trump watches this, please send him this message, this 2.6 economic growth is for one quarter. You can spike growth for a quarter all sorts of times. In fact, you know how many times during President Obama’s eight years growth was 2.6 percent or higher? 14 quarters. 14 quarters.”
RUHLE: “One more time, say it again.”
VELSHI: “14 times during president Obama’s Administration growth was 2.6 percent or higher. Eight times it was 3 percent or higher. So Donald Trump just has to get off of this GDP kick. It is just nonsensical and it is disingenuous. I don’t know how many different ways I can say this.”
RUHLE: “More importantly, he needs to get off of it to save himself. If he puts himself in a situation, if we budget the U.S. — if Mick Mulvaney puts a budget in place, assuming we pay 3 percent GDP, we’re not going to. That is a goal, not a baseline. If you want to disappoint the American people, tell them they’re going to get that, because, guess what, that’s not real life.”
VELSHI: “We’re going to talk about immigration in one second. Another point to make, he talked about, ‘We’re going to make more product in the United States.’ It is important to understand we have not stopped making product in 40 years. We made more product almost every year, we’re doing it with fewer workers. That’s the legitimate problem and it is worth talking about, but we don’t make more product. We make more stuff with less people. We have not suffered on that front. This Foxconn thing in Wisconsin, I don’t know if any of you live in Pennsylvania, but you may remember there was a promise to build a Foxconn plant in 2013 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Let somebody from Harrisburg tweet me and let me know how that factory is coming along. Foxconn doesn’t keep its promises.”
