WASHINGTON—Poof. The government’s figures on jobs and unemployment are no longer fake, U.S. President Donald Trump says.

Nothing has changed about how the government calculates the data. Trump’s words, conveyed by press secretary Sean Spicer on Friday, are confirmation that Trump had undermined public confidence in an important government institution for cynical political purposes.

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As a candidate, Trump habitually disparaged the information provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate, he said, was “phoney,” “artificial,” “totally fiction,” one of “the biggest hoaxes in modern politics,” “massaged to make the existing economy look good, to make this administration look good when, in fact, it's a total disaster.”

But on Friday, the bureau released its latest monthly jobs report. It showed that the U.S. economy had added 235,000 jobs in February, beating expectations, and that the unemployment rate dropped to 4.7 per cent from 4.8 per cent.

Trump’s team crowed. And Spicer explained that Trump believes the new numbers are valid.

“I talked to the president prior to this,” Spicer said at his daily briefing, “and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phoney in the past, but it’s very real now.’”

Then he chuckled. So did some of the press corps.

Other Republicans also changed their tune. Under Barack Obama a year prior, when the Feb. 2016 report showed a gain of 242,000 jobs, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady said “it’s disappointing to see so little growth in full-time work and wages.” This time, with 7,000 fewer jobs added, Brady declared, “This is a great report.”

The U.S. economy has now experienced 77 consecutive months of job growth.

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