Jasmine Crockett blasts Trump economy’s ‘attack’ on Black women and minority-owned businesses

“While the wealth gap was starting to close under the previous administration, he’s widening it in a lot of ways,” Crockett told theGrio.

Following a better-than-expected jobs report this week, President Donald Trump declared that “The Golden Age of America is upon us!!!” But while the unemployment rate dipped to 4.3% and 130,000 jobs were added in January, the devil is in the details. Last year’s job growth was significantly down from before Trump’s return to the White House (181,000 in 2025 vs. 1.46 million in 2024), and economic stability particularly remains out of reach for Black and Brown communities.

“Everything’s falling apart,” says U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who says Trump’s tariffs, signature tax cuts from last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and attacks on DEI have created an economic disaster for minorities.

“While the wealth gap was starting to close under the previous administration, he’s widening it in a lot of ways,” Crockett told theGrio.

The unemployment rates for Black Americans (7.2%) and Hispanics (4.7%) remain higher than the national rate, and, according to the most recent racial wealth gap statistics in 2023, white households have a significantly higher accumulation of median wealth ($250,400) than Black households ($56,490) and Hispanic households ($65,540). However, as a result of continued inflation and lost jobs in Trump’s economy, the racial wealth gap has likely increased.

The Trump administration’s rolling back of racial equity protections in federal contracting has especially hurt Black businesses, notes Crockett, who is running for U.S. Senate in Texas, which has the second-largest economy in the United States.

“One of the things that we know is true is that minority businesses, whether they’re Black or Brown…tend to hire more minorities,” said the Texas congresswoman, who said Democrats should be implementing policy to scale capital for minority-owned businesses.

“The federal government consistently does more contracting than anybody else. This is where people get their money from. Elon Musk gets $8 million a day from the federal government in federal contracts,” said Crockett, referring to the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX and former Trump White House advisor.

“We have to figure out creative ways to make sure that minorities who actually were never getting their fair share, in these federal dollars…it literally is redistributed to everyone but us,” she said.

Crockett lamented over how Trump’s economy has especially hit Black women as a result of the administration’s anti-DEI agenda.

“He’s reducing our accessibility to education. I think that that is a specific target, an attack on Black women, who are the most educated demographic in this country,” she told theGrio. “While at the same time, it’s 330,000 Black women, as of the most recent reporting, and I think that the number is probably higher now that have lost their jobs of the 1.1 million.”

Crockett continued, “They now are downgrading educational degrees, reducing people’s ability to get certain degrees, because now you won’t be able to get the funding from the federal government.”

The U.S. Senate candidate says another key policy focus must be increasing homeownership, noting that interest rates remain high and housing supply remains low.

“With those housing supply shortages, it means that rents as well as mortgages are higher than they need to be,” said Crockett, who introduced the Combatting the Housing Supply Shortage Act, which would incentivize the construction of new, affordable housing by increasing the number of Tax-Exempt Private Activity Bonds available in states with high demand for new housing.

However, Crockett noted that implementing any of the “good policies” she and Democrats would like to see remains “very difficult” until they can repeal Trump’s global tariffs, which have driven up prices for most goods. A case before the U.S. Supreme Court could end Trump’s billions of dollars in tariffs.

In addition to Trump’s tariffs, Crockett said Democrats must work to “roll back” Trump’s $4 trillion tax cuts that experts say will mostly benefit America’s wealthiest and corporations. What’s worse, she said, the tax cuts came at the expense of health care, with nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that have driven up monthly premiums.

“I think we have to make sure that we roll back those cuts that were ushered in and start to kind of redistribute this wealth, as we saw that this was the largest distribution of wealth from those that are the working class up to the rich folk,” said Crockett.