Donald Trump has once again, knowingly or not, said something that isn’t factually accurate. Trump has claimed that his deal with Carrier would save 1,100 jobs from being moved to Mexico, which turned out to have been an exaggeration. According to Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, the number of jobs that Trump “saved” is actually 800 since 300 of them were never under threat of being moved to Mexico. Therefore, Trump stood on the stage at Carrier and wrongfully took credit for saving jobs that didn’t even need saving.
“But he got up there, and, for whatever reason, lied his a– off.” – Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999
Not only did he lie about saving 300 jobs, he also neglected to mention that he failed to save 550 jobs that will be moving to Mexico. The deal only included the people who worked in the part of the Carrier plant where they build furnaces, all the people who worked making fan coils are still going to lose their jobs next year. However, since Trump has been tweeting and talking about saving 1,100 jobs, some workers at Carrier thought that their jobs were safe, when in fact, Trump was just exaggerating and lying about how big the deal actually was. Consequently, he gave many workers false hope.
The way that Trump went from saving 800 jobs to 1,100 was that he added 300 administrative jobs that were never in danger of being moved to Mexico to his list of jobs that he had saved. He presumably did that to get the number closer to 1,400, which is the number of jobs that he promised to keep during the campaign. However, it isn’t acceptable for the President-elect to fabricate numbers because he wants to make himself look better. He has said that Carrier will remain in Indiana, but the truth is that only a part of the plants will stay there. Additionally, the deal wasn’t Trump’s superior negotiation tactics’ accomplishment, but rather the fact that Carrier will receive 7 million dollars in tax breaks paid for by the citizens of Indiana.
Moreover, the Trump transition team didn’t want to give a comment to CNN or The Washington post on the exaggerated numbers, but Trump himself sure did. In true Trump fashion, he didn’t apologize for getting the facts wrong. Instead, he went to Twitter to attack the person who criticized him, which, in this case, was the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, Chuck Jones.
Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2016
If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2016
Why acknowledge that you got your facts wrong, when you can attack a man that your Vice President-elect called “hardworking” just a couple of months ago? The Carrier deal was important to the Trump administration for another reason, and that is Vice President-elect Mike Pence being the Governor of Indiana, where the Carrier Plant is located. Securing this deal was a big win for Pence, who has been in talks to ‘save’ the Carrier jobs for months.
“I think he ought to make sure he gets all the facts straight before he starts talking about what he’s done.” – Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999
It is understandable that he wanted to make the deal seem as great as possible, but did he really think that no one would notice that he was tweeting the wrong numbers? Or did he not know how many jobs he saved? Unfortunately, it is actually possible that he might not have known that he was wrong, since that seems to have been the case in the past. One example of Trump seemingly not knowing the facts are his tweets about the millions of people voted illegally in the last election, even though there is absolutely no evidence to back up his claim. He, however, seemed to believe it, since people close to him have told him wrong facts before. That could have been the case when it came to the Carrier deal too, which is incredibly worrying. It has become all too common for Trump to be misinformed, which needs to stop if Trump is to govern responsibly.
One of Trump’s central promise throughout his campaign was to keep American jobs in the U.S. and punish companies who leave America. This deal with Carrier appeared to be a start of a trend that would continue throughout his presidency. Although a lot of people have criticized the Carrier deal, it was still a victory for Trump, who can now point to a concrete example of what his presidency would mean for American workers. It was a shining beacon of hope for many industrial workers who were worried that their jobs were going to be moved to foreign countries, but after Jones’ statement, the deal might not seem so shiny anymore.
