During his latest appearance on “Meet the Press,” Sen. JD Vance eagerly boasted to NBC News’ Kristen Welker that Donald Trump brought “manufacturing jobs back to our country” during his term. Moments later, the Republican vice presidential nominee went into more detail.
“Because if you go back to the Trump presidency, we had 12,000 factories that were built during Donald Trump’s presidency,” the Ohio senator declared.
For those keeping an eye on Vance’s rhetoric, the comments were familiar: He made the identical claim, nearly word for word, a week earlier on “Fox News Sunday.” What’s more, it’s not just the senator: Trump himself has repeatedly made the same boast, including in his final State of the Union address before losing his re-election bid.
So, is it true? The Washington Post published a very helpful fact-check report.
“Factories” conjures up images of smokestacks and production lines, but the dataset cited by Trump — and now Vance — is not really about factories. Trump is citing a Bureau of Labor Statistics database set known as the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which counts the number of “establishments in private manufacturing.” But more than 80 percent of these “manufacturing establishments” employ five or fewer people. If those sound like pretty small factories, that’s because many are not “factories.”
Quite right. For the purposes of data analysis, the Labor Department counts “factories” as businesses that “transform materials or substances into new products.”
In other words, if you opened a bakery, that’s a “factory.” If you knit cute little frogs and sell them on your porch, that’s a “factory,” too. It’s why Vance’s claim garnered the dreaded “Four Pinocchios” assessment in the Post’s report. And while that assessment seemed more than fair given the circumstances, we can go a bit further and note that those looking for an administration with more legitimate grounds to boast about American manufacturing shouldn’t look to Trump; they should look to his successor. CNBC reported last week: The Inflation Reduction Act 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.
In fact, the aforementioned Post article noted that if Vance wants to brag about the creation of nearly 18,000 additional “manufacturing establishments” under Trump, that same number would be nearly 39,000 under Biden. As The New York Times’ Paul Krugman summarized in a column in April, “President Biden appears to be presiding over the kind of manufacturing surge Trump had promised. … [T]he fact is that Biden is actually doing something Trump boasted about but never achieved: promoting a significant revival in U.S. manufacturing.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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