Trump Failed His Promises to Michigan Auto Industry Before COVID

Ex-president Donald Trump has been making repeated promises about returning Michigan auto industry jobs to “greatness,” but when he was president the jobs in vehicle and parts manufacturing declined way before COVID hit, according to new analysis by The Detroit News.

Trump made his usual sweeping promises days ago that he would return Michigan’s auto industry “at levels that have never been seen before” and “All your car factories are going to be coming back. You’ll have more jobs than you’ve ever had in this state. Your car industry will be as big, relatively, as it was 60 years ago, when you were like dominant.”

These promises sound a lot like his 2016 promises eight years ago that he wouldn’t let one single plant close.

The Republican nominee “failed to fully deliver on similar guarantees, made eight years ago, before his first term in the White House,” said the report in the Detroit News (paywall).

Yet, the number of jobs in vehicle and parts manufacturing in Michigan declined during Trump’s first term — including before the COVID-19 pandemic hit — according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while there were some additional investments made by the industry in Michigan over his four years in office, there were also auto plants that closed in the state, including the General Motors Co. Warren Transmission plant in 2019.

…

The number of jobs in vehicle and parts manufacturing in Michigan was about 175,000 when Trump took office in January 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It dropped to 171,300 in February 2020, a decrease of 2.2%, before the state reported its first COVID-19 cases in March 2020… By the end of Trump’s term, there were 166,300 jobs in vehicle and parts manufacturing in Michigan, a drop of 5% from when he took office, according to the bureau’s data.

It’s unlikely that the industry will substantially increase the number of workers in Michigan beyond the current trajectory because they’d have to come from other U.S. regions, Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting for AutoForecast Solutions LLC, told The Detroit News.

He explained a big issue with Trump’s tariff plan, “Raising tariffs to bring internationally sourced parts stateside will raise prices of vehicles that are already believed to be too expensive.”

Trump’s promise about returning the auto job levels to the 1970s made Metro Detroit demographer Kurt Metzger laugh. He told the Detroit News, “absolutely not.”

Even his own supporters can’t agree that Trump can accomplish what he’s promising voters. As Republican and Trump supporting Michigan state Sen. Jim Runestad said, “It’s going to be a tough road to hoe to turn it back to what it was in the 1960s and 1970s. But you could certainly reverse the decline.”

Runestad was one of 11 state Senators to support Trump’s attempt to overthrow the will of the people and steal the 2020 election. The Detroit News says he  blamed COVID for the bad auto job numbers from Trump’s first term, although the jobs had already declined prior to COVID, and he thinks Trump’s 100% to 200% tariffs on cars being made in Mexico and sold in the U.S. could work.

When the Detroit News asked the Trump campaign why voters should believe them now given how Trump made the same promises in 2016 and didn’t deliver, the Trump campaign reiterated one of Trump’s 2016 claims about “unleashing energy” (this is a common Republican refrain):

“Under President Trump, we will unleash American energy and give the auto industry the tools to be bigger, better and stronger.”  What tools?

The Trump campaign also claimed that Michigan will lose jobs if Harris is elected and that Trump created more new manufacturing jobs “in his first 37 months” than Biden’s administration did over its first 37 months.

Of course, by March of this year, which is approximately 37 months,  under President Biden the U.S. has added 423,000 manufacturing jobs. “Almost every state added manufacturing jobs in the first 11 months after President Biden came into office. By comparison, the U.S. added just 2,000 manufacturing jobs in 2019,” the Joint Economic Committee Democrats shared.

An even starker picture is painted by the BlueGreen Alliance, “Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021, more than 775,000 manufacturing jobs have been added to the economy. The growth is expected to continue, with the Biden-Harris Inflation Reduction Act estimated to create 336,000 manufacturing jobs a year until 2035.”

“In contrast, more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during former President Donald Trump’s single term. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic manufacturing job growth had all but plateaued under the Trump administration.”

President Biden’s approach is reality based

President Biden made it his mission to reinvigorate and protect America by bringing manufacturing back, beefing up our supply chains and creating good paying jobs. Biden’s Investing in America agenda and bipartisan Infrastructure law have not only helped rebuild our crumbling bridges, but supported more than 700,000 new jobs a year. 

Infrastructure is another thing Trump promised but didn’t do.

CNBC determined that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, for which not one single Republican voted, “has sparked a manufacturing boom across the U.S., mobilizing tens of billions of dollars of investment, particularly in rural communities in need of economic development.”

Trump wants to repeal the IRA, by the way. So that manufacturing boom would no longer be supported. Additionally, Biden executed an EO in Michigan to promote good-paying jobs with strong labor standards.

The AP reported Tuesday morning, “U.S. job openings rose unexpectedly in August as the American labor market continued to show resilience…. Job openings have come down steadily since peaking at 12.2 million in March 2022, but they remain above where they stood before the coronavirus pandemic hit the American economy in early 2020.”

Donald Trump makes a lot of empty promises about calling the morning after you vote for him, but when voters woke up after he got what he wanted, he ghosted them.

Nowhere to be found, surrounded by his mafia-like entourage that punished anyone who didn’t kiss the ring and perpetuating falsehoods to appease Trump’s ego. And in 2021,  Trump incited an insurrection to overthrow the will of the people, but the President they elected took office and he is the one who worked tirelessly to help bring manufacturing back and create good paying jobs for American families, all while the legacy media largely ignored his efforts, perhaps because they were aimed at the working class instead of the investment class.

Could the contrast really be this stark? The numbers don’t lie and neither do the last almost four years of work by Biden, which we have covered brick by brick because we saw that he was taking important steps to transform America so the working class had a fighting chance again. Yes, the contrast is this stark. There are nuances as always, but in the end, Trump didn’t do the work to fulfill his promises and Biden did.

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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