It's Even Worse Than You Think Page 6

  That does not sit well with Trump and the political termites his administration has put to work inside our government, eating away at its structure. Trump has attacked renewable energy again and again. A major stated goal of his term in office will be much greater extraction and use of fossil fuels. And more than any other form of carbon, Trump loves coal. He boasts that he has wrought a revival of American coal mining, a tenuous claim, but in his mind a certainty. And Trump is undaunted by the mounting evidence of climate change and global warming. He insists that climate change is imaginary and certainly not caused by burning fossil fuels. And those beliefs, it seems, outweigh the value of jobs for Americans that enable green energy in poor countries.

  Immediately after taking the oath of office, Trump declared that “from this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”

  It appears that Trump’s inaugural address promise that every decision would favor American workers came with a hidden caveat not included in the speech everyone heard or in the official White House text but buried in an obscure budget document that no one was expected to notice. Only because of a Freedom of Information request did this justification document become public.

  Other actions Trump took that contradicted his inaugural address and his campaign promises were done openly, the first of them on the very day he became president.

  A Mighty Job Creator

  Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of jobs, jobs, and more jobs. He said businesses would create jobs galore during his presidency, especially manufacturing jobs. All he had to do was apply his negotiating skills while quickly dispatching 75 percent of “job-killing” federal regulations. With these rules dead, Trump said companies would rapidly and happily bring back all the jobs they had shipped overseas and create even more back home in America. Companies that persisted in manufacturing beyond America’s borders would get hit with stiff levies when their goods reached American ports, he said. And for good measure he made clear that any company whose executives and directors were so foolish as to defy him would get tongue-lashings that would make their brand names mud.

  The promise of a manufacturing revival resonated in the Rust Belt states, especially Michigan and Wisconsin. Along with Pennsylvania, the Wolverine and Badger states gave Trump his Electoral College victory despite his losing the popular vote nationwide by 2 percentage points and 2.9 million ballots.

  Factory workers in these states had suffered through slowly worsening times as companies moved good-paying jobs making cars, cheese, and cleansers to the American South, often lured not just by cheap labor but fat subsidies that helped pay for whole new factories. Many jobs left the Midwest heartland for Mexico and China, where workers could be had for mere pennies on the dollar previously paid to Americans. The loss of these jobs radiated through the economies of places like Flint, Lansing, and Saginaw, where homes became like the cars once made there—depreciating assets whose value declined with time. The real value of homes in these once prosperous manufacturing communities was lower in 2016 than it had been four or five decades earlier. These economic hardships were the product of changes in the government rule book instituted by both political parties and taken advantage of by many employers, including the hotel and other businesses of Donald J. Trump, that last a fact he never brought up.

  Six weeks before Election Day Trump gave a major address on jobs. “We’re going to have job growth like you’ve never seen,” he told the Polish American Congress meeting in Chicago. “I’m very good for jobs. In fact, I will be the greatest president for jobs that God ever created. That I can tell you.”

  As president, Trump promised “a bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade.”

  Just four days after Trump took office he signed five executive orders that the White House said would create “massive” numbers of new jobs, especially by speeding completion of two controversial oil pipelines across the Upper Midwest. The Keystone Pipeline to move Canadian tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries would create “a lot of jobs, 28,000 jobs, great construction jobs,” Trump said as he signed one executive order.

  Covering all sides of the story, journalists quickly found official data, reports, and sources that knocked down the massive job creation Trump boasted would flow from his pen. Government reports showed that on average the construction jobs would last less than five months. Counting them as full-time equivalents, a standard measure used by business and government, the most generous estimates from Keystone’s own reports put the figure at the equivalent of 3,900 full-time jobs lasting no more than two years. In addition, the State Department estimated 12,000 new long-term jobs related to the expanded extraction of tar sands oils in Canada, transporting the heavy oil and using it after refining in the American South, much of it to make a solid dry fuel for electric power plants, known as petroleum coke or petcoke, which pollutes the air much more than coal. Altogether those job count measures came to not much more than half of what Trump said in the Oval Office.

  Further reducing Trump’s 28,000 jobs figure was that much of the work making steel pipe, compressors, and other pipeline equipment had already been done. And a fair amount of that work employed people not in America, but in Canada, India, and Italy. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post “Fact Checker” columnist, awarded Trump’s Keystone jobs announcement three Pinocchios, rating Trump’s words mostly false.

  Interpreted generously, this was yet another example of Trump’s explanation in The Art of the Deal for making stuff up, as when he said over and over that Trump Tower was sixty-eight stories even though it was only fifty-eight. Whether applied to how many apartments he sold at what prices, how much gamblers lost in his casinos, or his claims that his cheaply built concrete structures were the very best, Trump reveled in what he called “truthful hyperbole.” While a real estate promoter may find commercial gain in such lies, when presidents speak, their words get scrutinized.

  Trump disliked being held as president to a higher standard of accuracy than when he was in business boasting about how great his golf courses were, how fine his neckties were, and how everything with his name on it was the most beautiful, the best, the most desired. Trump and his surrogates complained that he was being held to a different standard than other politicians, being scrutinized more and more thoroughly just because he was Trump, and journalists who didn’t like him were picking on him.

  The fact-checking by many news organizations of his Keystone Pipeline jobs claims did not just wash over Trump. Instead it boiled inside until his first presidential press conference four weeks after he entered the Oval Office.

  Straightaway Trump made clear what was on his mind. He was not being hailed as the greatest problem solver ever in the White House, the greatest jobs creator of all time. Only by going directly to the public, he said, would the American people ever know the truth about his mighty achievements. “We have made incredible progress,” he said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done.” The problem, Trump said, was that journalists refused to report these great achievements. “The dishonest press,” he said in a hectoring tone. “The press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

  Among his unheralded achievements was fundamentally changing the way business leaders thought about hiring, or so Trump insisted. The important story that no one knew, he complained, was that “there has been a tremendous surge of optimism in the business world, which to me means something much different than it used to. It used to mean, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ Now it means, ‘That’s good for jobs.’ Very different. Plants and factories are already starting to move back into the United States, and bi
g league—Ford, General Motors, so many of them. I’m making this presentation directly to the American people, with the media present . . . because many of our nation’s reporters and folks will not tell you the truth.”

  There were of course many front-page and network news stories at the time citing improved business confidence and how the stock market surged in expectation of a Trump tax cut and at least some regulations being shredded. But Trump was blind to these facts.

  Continuing to let out the emotional steam inside, he said, “I’m here again, to take my message straight to the people. As you know, our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess. It’s a mess—at home and abroad, a mess. Jobs are pouring out of the country; you see what’s going on with all of the companies leaving our country, going to Mexico and other places, low pay, low wages.” He then moved on to talk about the Middle East and other issues.

  Reminders of his extraordinary prowess, his unappreciated greatness, in job creation became a recurring theme of Trump talks. The very next week, in his address to a joint session of Congress that new presidents give instead of a State of the Union address, Trump expanded on his self-proclaimed achievements in job creation.

  “Since my election,” Trump declared, “Ford, Fiat Chrysler, General Motors, Sprint, SoftBank, Lockheed, Intel, Walmart, and many others have announced that they will invest billions and billions of dollars in the United States and create tens of thousands of new American jobs.”

  In other settings, he took credit for tens of thousands of new jobs and many tens of billions of dollars of investment by such firms as cable television provider Charter Communications and oil giant ExxonMobil. He was still on this theme six months later, when job growth was slowing markedly, telling a Phoenix rally for the far distant 2020 campaign about even more jobs that came from Trump’s leadership skills. “Struggling American workers are now beginning to see the light because plants are coming pouring back into our country and, by the way, we are doing a lot of good work on that front. A lot of good people are coming in. We have Foxconn, they make the iPhones for Apple, and so many companies are building now in our country, including the auto companies that are coming back.”

  There were problems with all of these statements. None of the claims of credit for bringing jobs back was true, according to the companies and others involved. None of the new investments were because of Trump, according to the carefully worded statements of the companies and the observations of stock market and industry analysts who followed the companies. Some of the deals had been negotiated as far back as 2011.

  Five times, for example, Trump tweeted about ExxonMobil investing $20 billion and creating 45,000 Texas jobs over ten years along the Gulf of Mexico. The sum was not especially large given the company’s annual revenues and the fact that it budgets over a ten-year period around $200 billion for capital expenditures worldwide. Trump claimed that the investment was “to a large extent because of our policies and the policies of this new administration.” The company said the investments began in 2013 and were needed to process oil and gas made available by fracking technology, especially in Texas.

  Then there was Intel, the leading maker of computer microchips. Trump announced that Intel “will move ahead with a new plant in Arizona that it was probably never going to move ahead with, and that will result in at least 10,000 American jobs.” Intel had announced the deal in 2011, but soon after putting up the factory walls Intel decided to hold off on buying the very expensive gear for making computer chips because of soft demand from buyers.

  Trump’s tweet two days before crowed that Lockheed Martin would hire 1,800 people in Texas, saying the defense contractor “came back because of me!” Federal laws and regulations require most work on defense equipment to be done by Americans in American factories. In addition, the company gently noted, its hiring reflected a ramping up of F-35 fighter jet production from 36 warplanes in 2014 to an expected 150 or more by 2019.

  One of the most interesting Trump claims, one that showed what thin reeds of fact he rested his job claims on, involved Foxconn. That is the brand name of the Taiwanese company Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, Ltd. Foxconn has a long history of promising to build plants in America and then not following through. Its supposed $10 billion Wisconsin deal turned out to be nothing more than a single sheet of paper obtained by reporter Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

  The handwritten record of the negotiations, if they can be called that, showed Governor Scott Walker giving Foxconn an initial large taxpayer subsidy that kept getting bigger and bigger as negotiations continued so the company would announce plans for a new factory in America’s Dairyland. That was itself strange because Walker holds himself out as a staunch fiscal conservative, as much a guardian of taxpayer money as Trump says he is the champion job creator. Yet Walker agreed to ever larger subsidies for Foxconn until the taxpayer gifts reached $3 billion. Beyond that, there was no solid evidence that Foxconn was serious this time about building, especially building a sophisticated electronics operation in a state not known as a high-tech center.

  What Foxconn is well known for is pushing its Chinese employees to work such long hours under tight supervision while living in company-owned dorms that many workers have committed suicide. Numerous reports documented how the Apple contractor rigidly enforces a “forced labor” system, including workers who under Chinese law are children. To characterize the brutal conditions at Foxconn’s China factories where Apple iPhones and other Apple consumer products are assembled, critics invoke the Mandarin word guolaosi. It means “worked to death.”

  Trump never mentioned these fatal working conditions, even though as far back as 2010 a newspaper he loves to see his name in, The New York Times, was reporting that Foxconn workers were taking their own lives. But if Foxconn ever does build a Wisconsin factory, one thing is clear—under Trump the number of American job safety inspectors will be much smaller than the already shrunken staff he inherited, because of Trump’s budget cuts. When Trump took office, the Labor Department already had fewer inspectors than in 1940, when America’s workforce was less than a third the size it is in 2017. And the requirements Foxconn will have to meet for keeping records of worker injuries and deaths will be much looser, part of that reduction in regulations that Trump said would mean so many more American jobs.

  * * *

  Many times Trump made claims that, because of him, before long many more Americans would have jobs making Ford cars and trucks, Lincolns, and other vehicles. These claims were gently shot down by company spokesmen, though they trod very carefully lest Trump’s ire and presidential powers be aimed at the financially strongest of the American carmakers. Mark Fields, the Ford Motor chief executive, said Ford did indeed plan to build a new plant in Flat Rock, a half hour from its world headquarters outside Detroit, but purely for business reasons. The new plant would manufacture electric-powered cars and trucks the company was developing.

  Ford also planned to experiment in Flat Rock with new manufacturing techniques to cut costs. The Michigan site was expected to help in developing Ford’s first self-driving cars, technology that would require intense and expensive inputs from engineers, computer scientists, and materials experts. One auto analyst noted that “keeping a new technology near the engineers is an important thing, at least in the first generation” of vehicles. Another auto industry watcher pointed out that Mexico, where Ford said it would continue to make its inexpensive gasoline-powered Focus models, offered a “just good enough” workforce while Michigan had an abundance of much more skilled manufacturing workers. Ford later said Focus assembly was moving to China.

  Curiously, Trump said very little critical of General Motors, which was laying off workers in Michigan and Ohio in 2016 while expanding production in China, including a plant to build sport utility vehicles for sale in the United States. Trump, like his father, Fred, is a lifelong Cadillac fan, having been drive
n in the family limousine on his morning newspaper route in Queens when it rained or snowed and going off to college in the maroon Cadillac his parents gave him as a gift. When he was in the gambling business in 1988, Trump licensed the sale of Trump-branded Cadillac limousines, each with two telephones, a videocassette player, a fax machine, rosewood cabinets, and Trumpian stemware to go with the alcohol dispensers. The two men Trump licensed to fabricate the Trump Executive and Golden series limousines were a convicted extortionist and a wealthy dealer of Japanese-built cars who also happened to be a convicted thief and was identified in law enforcement reports as associated with the Colombo crime family.

  But while Trump made all these fantastical claims about his skill at creating jobs, other events were under way that challenged his whole claim to be the greatest job creator of all time. Job growth in America began slowing down after he took office. Companies were not honoring Trump’s demands that they buy American. Some industries were eager to get apprentices to learn job skills, something voters no doubt thought Trump knew something about given his former job hosting two reality television shows in which contestants vied to be his apprentice. And the one small-bore effort Trump had made to save some jobs, garnering enormous favorable news coverage, was turning out to be smoke and mirrors.

  Forgetting the Forgotten Man

  In 2010, the United States Department of Labor created a website to honor workers who died on the job. “More than 4,500 workers lose their lives on the job every year. Below are the names of just a few who have died in recent months. OSHA’s mission is to prevent workplace injuries, illnesses and deaths.”

  That Occupational Safety and Health Administration webpage was intended to highlight and humanize workplace deaths, to insure awareness of tragedies, especially those that could have been avoided, according to Jordan Barab, an assistant secretary of labor during the Obama administration.