Remember when Donald Trump would dismiss employment statistics as “phony” for showing unemployment falling under Barack Obama? He claimed to know experts then who said the true rate was as much as eight times higher than published.

But that was before the bombastic billionaire was president.

So when the Labour Department announced on Friday that employers had added 235,000 jobs in February – the first full month since Mr Trump took office – the president was only too happy to take the numbers at face value. He quickly retweeted a story by the conservative Drudge Report with the headline: "GREAT AGAIN".

The figures are certainly good news for his stumbling administration, contending with a slew of negative reports about behind-the-scenes chaos, secret ties to Russia and the troubled roll-out of Mr Trump’s travel ban.

Elected on a promise to return jobs to America, Mr Trump can now claim to have cut the unemployment rate from 4.8 per cent to 4.7 per cent – even if much of the credit lies with his predecessor.

That is certainly how Sean Spicer, his spokesman, saw it.