Back-to-back days of economic wins propelled President Joe Biden on Friday to make a surprise appearance at the White House press briefing, the first of his presidency.

On Thursday evening, the International Longshoremen’s Association — the union representing 45,000 dockworkers at East and Gulf Coast ports — agreed to suspend its three-day strike until Jan. 15 after reaching a tentative deal on wages.

A person briefed on the agreement said the ports sweetened their wage offer from about a 50% raise over six years to 62%. A prolonged strike could have caused product shortages and higher prices for American consumers.

“I was determined to avert a crisis at this moment because it's a critical moment,” Biden said. “If we didn't do this now, we'd have a real problem.”

Then Friday morning, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers added a robust 254,000 jobs in September, significantly topping forecasts that were about 100,000 less. 

With three-and-a-half months left in his presidency, Biden sought to declare his administration’s approach to the economy victorious.

“From the very beginning, we were told time and again that the policies we were pursuing, [that] we'd put forward weren't going to work, make things worse, including some of the other team are still saying they're going to get worse. But we've proven them wrong.”

He said critics believed the $1.9 trillion pandemic recovery legislation he signed, known as the American Rescue Plan, was too big and would hurt private investment.  

“We proved them wrong, vaccinated the nation and got immediate economic relief to people in need,” he said, adding the U.S. has attracted nearly $1 trillion in private-sector investment from domestic and foreign companies during presidency.

Biden said many economists predicted the U.S. would not get inflation under control without first going into a recession and experiencing massive job losses. 

“Once again, outside experts were wrong,” Biden said. “Inflation has come down. Wages have gone up faster than prices. Interest rates are down.”

But the president acknowledged there is “more work to do” to keep costs down, including for housing and prescription drugs.

The president again touted his philosophy of growing the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up,” joking with reporters, “I know you're tired of hearing me say that over and over again.”

Biden rattled off a series of numbers to bolster his claim, including that 16 million jobs have been created during his presidency, that the unemployment rate sits at just 4.1%, that GDP has grown 10% since he took office, that there have been 19 million new business applications filed, and that the stock market has hit record highs.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called Friday’s jobs numbers “another fake jobs report,” noting the numbers have often been revised down later. In August, the Labor Department said the economy had added 818,000 fewer jobs in 2023 and 2024 than it previously estimated.

“But all the fake numbers in the world aren’t going to fool people dealing with the Biden-Harris economic disaster every day,” Rubio wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Asked about Rubio’s comments, Biden said, “If you notice, anything MAGA Republicans don't like they call fake. Anything. The job numbers are what the job numbers are. They’re real.”

Friday’s report revised July’s job numbers higher by 55,000 — to 144,000 — and August’s up by 17,000 — to 159,000. 

The Trump campaign criticized Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, over weak manufacturing job numbers and inflation and claimed “their open border policies have destroyed 825,000 jobs for native-born Americans while 1.2 million foreign-born workers gained employment.”

On the suspension of the dockworkers strike, Biden said not only was a crisis averted, but the tentative agreement “shows the importance of collective bargaining and represents, I think, critical progress toward a strong contract.”

The next big negotiating hurdle for the two sides will be over automation.

The president said a lengthy strike would have compounded problems related to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene. He called the deal “a service to the American people.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.