Fact check: Trump makes false allegations about his record on manufacturing and coal work

Fact check: Trump makes false allegations about his record on manufacturing and coal work

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The speech included some major false and misleading allegations about work.

Trump claims that “our 700,000” has brought back manufacturing work.

Coal

After Trump denounced Biden for Obama’s efforts to reduce coal use, he said, “I saved it. I put our miners back to work.”

Facts first: As of August, 5,300 coal mines were lost under Trump. (As of February, it was a loss of 1,000.) And the industry in general keep going down. In the midst of a sequel shift by utilities in the direction of cheaper natural gas and cleaner renewable energy, US coal production in 2019 to the lowest level since 1978, when there was a major strike. Several coal companies went bankrupt in 2019 and 2020.
Trump has, as promised, taken policies to try to help the coal industry; it is certainly possible for him to argue that he was better for the industry than a Democrat would be, and it is possible that his efforts helped some miners get new jobs. But he did not come close to producing coal revival. The government’s energy information administration reported in May that 2019 was the first year since the 1880s that the US consumed more energy from renewable sources than from coal.

Brian Lego, a research assistant at West Virginia University who follows the coal industry, said conditions in the industry began to recover in 2016 before Trump’s election, and were then ‘relatively stable’ from 2017 to 2019. But he stressed that “it is stable at very low levels,” and stable due to increasing demand from abroad “rather than any noticeable improvement in domestic coal demand associated with a change in US policy. “

Conditions then worsened in late 2019 – “The last four months of the year were when market conditions really fell apart, and the fourth quarter was terrible,” Lego said – and got even worse due to the pandemic.

Washing machines

Trump claims that Samsung and LG decided to build US factories because of the tariffs he charged on washing machines imported from abroad.

“I set the tariff, and now it’s LG and Samsung, and these companies that made the washing machine are now coming to the United States. And to avoid the tariff, they’re building plants in the United States. And that’s OK. “And that’s what we need to do,” he said.

Facts first: This is misleading. The Samsung and LG US washing machine factories were both announced in 2017, months before Trump announced the rates in 2018. LG says the tariffs forced the company to make a larger investment in the plant than it initially planned, but that the tariffs were not at all the reason why he decided to build the plant.

John Taylor, spokesman for LG Electronics USA, said the company first decided to build a U.S. washing machine plant in 2011, and then took years to select a site in Tennessee, which he announced in February 2017. “We decided a long time ago. We announced the factory. “A year later, after we announced the factory, there were tariffs,” he said.

He said the tariffs were one of the reasons why the company ended up investing $ 360 million in the plant rather than $ 250 million.

“LG did not build the factory because of the tariffs, but the tariffs were one of the factors that forced us to speed up construction and invest more,” he said.

Trump can therefore boast about how his policies have led to additional investment – although research has found that the tariffs have also led to price increases for consumers – but it is at best ‘misleading’ to indicate that the plants exist due to the rates, says Scott Lincicome, a trade expert and senior fellow in economic studies at the Libertarian Cato Institute.

Samsung did not respond to a request for comment.

Repairing the pandemic

Trump once again boasts of setting records for job creation.

“In the last four months, we’ve added a record 10.6 million jobs – it’s never been this close. Four months, 10.6 million jobs,” he said.

Facts first: Trump has left out essential context. Immediately before this record gain of about 10.6 million jobs over four months, there was a much larger record loss of about 22.2 million jobs over two months. In other words, as of August, the country has fallen by 11.5 million jobs since March. (And as of August, the economy has lost 4.7 million jobs since the beginning of Trump’s presidency.)
Many of the 10.6 million jobs ‘added’ since May also represent people returning to their previous jobs, from which they were temporarily dismissed.

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