Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto cut into a White House speech by President Donald Trump on Thursday to once again correct some mischaracterizations the president made, specifically over former President Barack Obama’s economic record, which Cavuto noted was very solid.
In what was yet another campaign-type speech on White House grounds, the president blasted regulations put in place by the Obama administration in the wake of the 2008 recession, claiming the former president had destroyed jobs in the process.
While the speech aired live on Fox News, Cavuto cut away in order to issue a fact-check for his viewers.
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“I do want to clarify a couple of things he said, that no president in history has cut regulations as much as he has. That is true,” he noted, adding: “I think [Trump] might have mischaracterized the regulations that were added under Barack Obama.”
Cavuto, who regularly draws Trump’s ire for his critical coverage, pointed out that his audience “might recall we had this little thing called the financial meltdown” and that many of the regulations were put in place to prevent banks from selling risky mortgage securities, which helped cause the financial crisis.
The veteran Fox anchor then dispelled the notion that the post-meltdown regulations damaged the economy under Obama.
“The unemployment rate did, under Barack Obama, go down from a high of 10 percent to around 4.7 percent,” Cavuto stated. “President Trump, of course, sent that even lower, eventually getting us down to a 3.5 percent unemployment rate. But I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that during those eight years when Obama first came into office and we were bleeding about a million jobs a month that that was standard fare and that characterized the whole eight years.”
Additionally, the Fox host said, “it was not a disaster under Barack Obama,” pointing out that the Dow Jones tripled during the 44th president’s tenure and that companies did “very well.”
“Americans did very, very well,” he concluded. “So I just want to put that in some context here.”
