White House chief of staff: ‘It’s been a rough and tough year’

White House chief of staff Ron Klain said on Sunday that “it’s been a rough and tough year” amid the president’s lagging approval rating, but he argued that some of the issues the Biden administration was grappling with were ones they had inherited from the Trump administration.

“In my opinion, it’s been a rough and tough year. And we knew it would be. President Biden has said this all the time. We’re in a yearlong effort to dig out of the holes we were left,” Klain said during “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“We inherited a debt economy, 50,000 jobs a month. We’re now finally back to 500,000 jobs a month. We inherited a country where 4,000 people a day were dying from COVID. That’s now down 75 percent. So I understand that voters are tired,” he continued. 

Full W.H. Chief of Staff: ‘It’s been a rough and tough year’

In an exclusive interview with Meet the Press, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain talks about negotiations over the president’s domestic spending agenda.https://t.co/KC4lFoWu3R pic.twitter.com/ieKwOCN3Ea

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) November 7, 2021

Klain acknowledged that Americans were frustrated that it was taking the U.S. longer to improve its economy and tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and said that “they are in a ‘Show me, don’t tell me’ mode.”

“I think we are going to show them in the weeks and months ahead that we have made this progress on COVID, we have made this progress on the economy,” and that the bipartisan infrastructure bill would soon be implemented.

“I think that will pay off results,” Klain said. 

A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released last week indicated that Biden had a 43 percent positive approval rating while 51 percent gave him a negative approval rating. 

His approval rating among Americans has steadily declined since August as the president has sought to tackle a handful of issues including the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, a supply chain crisis, surges of COVID-19 cases earlier this year and slow job growth.

But a report by payroll processor ADP released last week found that private businesses had added 571,000 employees in October, outpacing economists’ expectations of about 400,000.