The Chair of the Republican Party Is Getting Shredded for Posting a Questionable 10 Year Challenge Meme Featuring Barack Obama and Donald Trump

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel faced significant criticism on social media after she posted misleading unemployment statistics as part of a "10-year challenge" disparaging Barack Obama while praising President Donald Trump.

Under Trump, "our economy is finally working for ALL Americans," McDaniel wrote.

The unemployment rate of 9.9 percent that McDaniel cites is misleading because that number reflects the unemployment rate at the start of Obama's term, during which he inherited a recession that began under former President George W. Bush.

McDaniel was almost immediately criticized.

McDaniel made headlines over the weekend after she came to the defense of the Trump administration at the same time as airline traffic threatened to grind to a halt as a result of a 35-day government shutdown and as the president's former associate Roger Stone was arrested in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference.

“This president and his administration continue to do incredible things for our country,” McDaniel said at the RNC's winter meeting. Although she did not acknowledge Stone by name, she did find time to refer to what she called “manufactured scandals and baseless allegations” against the president.

McDaniel also offered her audience a rather optimistic spin on the Republican Party's midterm election losses. Although the party lost 40 seats and control of the House of Representatives in November, she assured her listeners that the midterms were nonetheless a resounding success.

We minimized our losses in the House, in the face of a record 43 retirements,” she said, not mentioning that many of those same Republicans who retired did so because they feared they would not win elections in their districts due to Trump's unpopularity.

McDaniel's efforts to obfuscate the Obama administration's economic successes follows a long trail forged by the president himself.

Last year, for example, the president quoted Fox News contributor Peter Ferrara, who, in an appearance on “Fox and Friends”––the president’s show of choice––claimed that the nation’s economic recovery “got started on Election Day 2016.” Ferrara, an attorney and policy analyst, credited Trump’s “tax cuts and regulation cuts” for the healthy economy.

This claim was quickly shown to be incorrect. Digital strategist John Aravosis pointed out that the economy actually grew faster under Trump’s predecessor.

In fact, economists agree Obama essentially handed Trump a thriving economy, a fact many won’t let Trump––who has often taken credit for Obama’s successess––forget.