We all knew this was bullshit, but there's no denying it when the pink slips are signed.
The Carrier plant in Indiana that Trump personally swooped in to "save" after the election is shipping over 600 jobs to Mexico.
"The jobs are still leaving," said Robert James, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999. "Nothing has stopped."
In fact, after the layoffs are complete later this year, a few hundred union jobs will remain at the plant. But that is far different from what then-President-elect Trump said just three weeks after the election.
"They're going to have a great Christmas," Trump said to cheering steelworkers and local dignitaries on Dec. 1.
To be fair, Carrier did invest over $16 million in their Indiana facility, but those investments were made to automate the plant, not to hire humans.
Elsewhere, a couple hundred "saved" jobs at a Boeing facility in South Carolina are also being cut.
Boeing Co. said Thursday it will lay off fewer than 200 workers at its 787 Dreamliner campus in North Charleston, S.C., a plant that President Trump visited earlier this year, where he promoted his “Buy America” pledge.
The Post and Courier reported that the job cuts are part of a companywide effort to reduce costs in Boeing's commercial airplane division to compete with its French rival Airbus.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not gloating that people are losing their jobs just to spite Trump. I don't want to see anyone lose their jobs (well, except Trump himself and most of Congress) but the idea that he was personally going to tour every plant in America and deliver jobs like the goddamn jobs fairy was always a fantasy. And attacking trade isn't going to stop things like this from happening. Ripping apart the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) isn't going to stop automation or hinder our international competition. It will actually help the competition.
China and the European Union aren't going to handicap themselves just because we do.