White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Wednesday downplayed the importance of the announcement that Carrier Corp. will keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana that it planned to move to Mexico after discussions with the Donald Trump administration.
After being asked if the White House had any comment on President-elect Trump's use of the bully pulpit to pressure Carrier to keep the jobs in the U.S., Earnest gave a lengthy answer in which he highlighted a select few decisions made by President Obama during his tenure in office.
Earnest said during the White House daily press briefing that at first glance the deal seems to be good news before quickly pivoting to Obama's record.
"I know the president-elect has indicated that he deserves credit for that announcement, and I guess what I would observe is that if he is successful in doing that 804 more times, then he will meet the record of manufacturing jobs that were created in the United States while President Obama was in office," Earnest said.
Earnest continued brushing aside the Carrier news, arguing that a more accurate measure of comparison would be the "more than a million jobs in the industrial midwest that were saved when President Obama made the decision to save the American auto industry."
The White House spokesman appeared to compare Obama's job creation over his two-term presidency to Trump's time in the White House, which has not yet begun.