There are, after all, many millions of Americans who are of prime working age who are not working, not looking for a job, haven’t looked for a job in the last year and yet in a healthier economy may well prefer to work.

At the high point, in 1999, 84.6 percent of Americans 25 to 54 were working; now that is down to 81.1 percent. If we returned to the 1999 level, that would mean an additional 4.4 million working Americans. If we count those people — the missing workers — as unemployed, and tack them on to the definitions of unemployment included in U-6, we suddenly get to 20.1 million unemployed people and a 12.3 percent unemployment rate.

But back to Mr. Trump’s assertion that the true unemployment rate is more like 28 or 35 or 42 percent. Is there any plausible way to come up with a jobless rate at those kinds of levels?

As it happens, there is, and it’s right there near the top of the monthly jobless report. Only 59.6 percent of the United States population was employed in January. On the other side of that, a whopping 40.4 percent of the population is not employed.

If that is your definition of unemployed, well, yeah, the United States does have 40 percent unemployment. But keep in mind that this counts as unemployed every retiree, every college student, everyone who is unable to work because of a disability and every parent who voluntarily stays at home to raise a child.

But surely we can find a way to make the unemployment rate seem higher still, right?

I did some back-of-the-envelope math and came up with a way to get a jobless rate of about 53 percent! Instead of just including people 16 and above, the way the B.L.S. does, we could throw in those good-for-nothing children who are neither working, looking for work nor counted as part of the labor force.

Like my 2-year-old niece, Lilia, who if you ask me has had it too easy for too long. I just hope the job she finds in the Trump administration involves finger-painting.