If it looks like President Donald Trump’s portrayal of the American economy is getting less dismal—even as the major economic indicators remain fairly constant—that’s because it is.

During his presidential campaign, Trump attacked the Labor Department’s official estimates of the number of jobs added each month as “phony” and “total fiction.” He said that Americans were living in a “false economy,” and repeatedly said that he believed that the U.S. unemployment rate is as high as 35 percent. (It is currently 4.7 percent.) Even after Trump won the election, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, repeated this claim at his confirmation hearing in January, saying, “The unemployment rate is not real.”

But as many expected, Trump has been a bit more upbeat about America’s economy since taking office. On Friday, many eagerly waited to see how Trump would characterize February’s stellar jobs report. He retweeted the Drudge Report’s take, which characterized the latest jobs report as “GREAT AGAIN.”

The White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, didn’t mince words at a press conference Friday afternoon when Eamon Javers, a reporter for CNBC, brought up Trump’s previous doubts about the report’s veracity. “Does the president believe that this jobs report was an accurate and a fair way to measure the economy?” Javers asked. In response, Spicer said, “I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

Spicer quotes President Trump on jobs report: "They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now" https://t.co/Fk4fANPazC — MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 10, 2017

While it’s normal for presidents to occasionally tout a particularly good jobs report as personal victories, that doesn’t make this reversal any less alarming. It reinforces the concern that the Trump administration is ready to call official government statistics fake when they reveal something positive about the economic policies of a Democrat, but real when the good news is reflective of Republican leadership.