According to government statistics, there are 51,000 coal mining jobs in the entire United States. According to Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency head, “Since the fourth quarter of last year until most recently, we’ve added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector. In the month of May alone, almost 7,000 jobs.” Also according to Pruitt, “We’ve had over 50,000 jobs since last quarter—coal jobs, mining jobs—created in this country. We had almost 7,000 mining and coal jobs created in the month of May alone.” That’s not true. It’s screamingly false, in fact, but how it’s false is important. Pruitt took a carefully massaged talking point that was technically true but extremely misleading and he bungled it ever so slightly, making it extremely false.

Reality:

In the last four months of the Obama administration, September to January, there was a gain of 1,400 jobs. In the first four months of the Trump administration, there has been a gain of 1,000 jobs.

So what’s up with that 50,000 number?

Asked about Pruitt’s claim of 50,000 new coal jobs, his staff on Monday pointed to statistics encompassing seven months of job gains across the far broader “mining” sector. That includes not just coal but also oil and gas extraction, metal ore mining, stone quarrying and other unrelated jobs. Three of the months Pruitt’s staff is counting were while Barack Obama was still president.

Oh. So Pruitt got the time slightly wrong one time he delivered his misleading talking point and he left out the “mining”-separate-from-coal part one time, and he went from very misleading to big fat liar. Because there’s kind of a difference between “added 50,000 jobs to the coal industry which only has 51,000 jobs total so you can see that already Donald Trump is revitalizing coal” and “added 50,000 jobs to oil and gas and metal ore and stone quarrying and other jobs, of which 1,000 were in coal under Trump and 1,400 were in coal over the last four months of the Obama presidency, so maybe that’s not such a big deal after all.”

Donald Trump—and his underlings like Scott Pruitt—are lying to out-of-work coal miners and really to everyone in coal country, promising jobs that just aren’t going to come. The fact that the only way Pruitt can put a positive spin on the jobs numbers while coming anywhere close to the truth is by including a vast number of non-coal jobs in his tally highlights the lie. If they really believed they were bringing back coal jobs, they’d have a better story about it than “please ignore that I’m including oil and gas jobs in my numbers here.”