What Trump ACTUALLY said:

Posted on: May 21, 2018 at 13:51:52 CT

"The number isn't reflective. I've seen numbers of 24%-- I actually saw a number of 42% unemployment. Forty-two percent. 5.3%unemployment -- that is the biggest joke there is in this country. … The unemployment rate is probably 20%, but I will tell you, you have some great economists that will tell you it's a 30, 32. And the highest I've heard so far is 42%."

Did Trump HEAR someone say 42% or did he lie about that?

David Stockman wrote this:

"...At the present time, there are 210 million adult Americans between the ages of 16 and 68---to take a plausible measure of the potential work force. That amounts to 420 billion potential labor hours, if we accept the convention that all adults are at least theoretically capable of holding a full-time job (2,000 hours/year) and pulling their share of society's need for production and work effort.

By contrast, during 2014 only 240 billion hours were actually supplied to the US economy, according to the BLS estimates. Technically, therefore, there were 180 billion unemployed labor hours, meaning that the real unemployment rate was 42.9%, not 5.5%!..."