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DONALD TRUMP’S EMPTY PROMISES ON JOBS  
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Lawrence S. Wittner
April 15, 2024
The Hill
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_ During the four years of Trump’s presidency, the United States
lost 2.7 million jobs. As a result, he was the only president since
1939, when the U.S. government began compiling such employment
statistics, to preside over a net loss of jobs. _

Trump promises to save Carrier jobs, WRTV Indianapolis

 

In mid-2015, announcing his candidacy for president of the United
States,  Donald Trump declared
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he would “be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

Subsequently, the Republican billionaire hammered away at this
theme.  The nation’s loss of factory jobs, he argued, was
the fault of Democrats
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but, as he told a Detroit audience
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he would “restore manufacturing in the United States.” Addressing
a campaign rally in Warren, Mich., he asserted
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“If I’m elected . . . you won’t lose one plant, I promise you
that.”

With Trump’s election, however, just the opposite occurred. During
the four years of Trump’s presidency, the United States lost 2.7
million jobs
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a result, he was the only president since 1939, when the U.S.
government began compiling such employment statistics, to preside over
a net loss of jobs.
Indeed, when it came to job creation, Trump was vastly outperformed
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the other presidents. Bill Clinton oversaw the biggest gain, 23
million additional jobs, followed by Ronald Reagan (16 million), Joe
Biden (14 million), and Lyndon Johnson (12 million)―all the way down
to George W. Bush (1.4 million). During the presidency of Barack
Obama, Trump’s much-reviled predecessor, the United States added
11.6 million jobs.

Trump’s defenders point to the disruptive effect the COVID-19
pandemic had on the American economy. Although the disease crisis
certainly undermined employment during his presidency, it’s also
true that his denial and mismanagement
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the public health emergency deepened its human and economic impact in
the United States.  Furthermore, even before the pandemic hit, job
creation during the Trump presidency was relatively weak
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During Trump’s first 31 months in office, employment growth in the
United States averaged 176,000 jobs per month. During Biden’s first
31 months in office, employment growth averaged 433,000 jobs per
month.

Trump, of course, knew how to create jobs, and, during his 2016
presidential campaign, even touted a specific plan for doing
that―a $1 trillion federal program
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rebuild America’s infrastructure. “We are going to fix our inner
cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools,
hospitals,” he declared in a speech on the night of his election
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we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”

But Trump had very different priorities and, during his presidency,
his infrastructure program never materialized
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a result, federal investments on roads and bridges as a share of the
economy remained stagnant, Trump’s promises to upgrade ports and
airports went unfulfilled, and federal spending on water
infrastructure fell to a 30-year low. 

Scrapping its ballyhooed infrastructure plan, the Trump administration
instead pushed legislation through Congress in December 2017 that was
far more in tune with its real priorities―a $1.9 trillion tax cut
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corporations and wealthy Americans. “Corporations are literally
going wild over this
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Trump chortled. At the same time, adopting the GOP’s trickle-down
approach, the administration promoted this legislation (the misnamed
“Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) as a jobs-creating measure. Trump
predicted a boom in business investment and claimed that factories are
“not going to be abandoned any longer.”

 
In fact, none of this followed, and, two years later, business
investment was declining while mass layoffs continued. Recalling
Trump’s false promises about jobs creation, an embittered welder
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had supported Trump in 2016 assailed the president’s choice of tax
cuts for the rich over infrastructure investments and lamented that he
and other members of the building trades had been “snookered” by
Trump’s promises to rebuild the country.

In addition, despite all Trump’s talk of creating manufacturing
jobs, the nation actually had a net loss of 154,000 of them
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presidency.  Nor was this surprising, for between 2016 and 2018―a
period before the economic difficulties wrought by the
pandemic―nearly 1,800 U.S. factories shut down
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the United States.

The policies of the Trump administration played an important role in
this decline of U.S. manufacturing capacity and employment.
Its tariff wars with other nations
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to the problem of U.S. trade deficits that had long undermined U.S.
manufacturing. In addition, its tax policies
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including provisions in its “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” of 2017,
encouraged the outsourcing of jobs by U.S. corporations.

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* Trump's Job Losses; Tariff wars; Trump Tax Cuts;
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