Donald Trump loves to brag that companies have created jobs because of him. We know, piecemeal, that those claims often turn out to be false—and his brags have even stopped drawing the breathless headlines they once did. But it’s still amazing to see it all laid out, which is what ProPublica has done, assembling “31 specific claims about companies adding or saving American jobs thanks to his intervention” and tracking down what’s happened to those jobs. The topline is this: Trump made specific claims about 2.4 million jobs being saved or created because of him. Around 206,000 of those jobs materialized, and only 63,000 are “potentially attributable to Trump, according to the companies that did the hiring.”
It's worth checking out in graphic form, but out of the jobs that haven’t actually been created despite Trump’s very specific bragging, and the jobs that were only ever potential indirect impact, let’s focus for a minute on jobs that were already planned long before Trump arrived to take credit for them.
On January 4, 2017, Trump tweeted “Thank you to Ford for scrapping a new plant in Mexico and creating 700 new jobs in the U.S. This is just the beginning - much more to follow.” Except those 700 jobs had been planned since 2015 following negotiations of a union contract.
On January 9, 2017, Trump tweeted “It's finally happening - Fiat Chrysler just announced plans to invest $1BILLION in Michigan and Ohio plants, adding 2000 jobs.” Except … you got it, those jobs were also in the 2015 union contract.
Also in January 2017, Trump claimed credit for 2,000 Lockheed Martin jobs being created thanks to the Pentagon’s existing budget and for 5,000 General Motors jobs, a chunk of which were, yes, pledged in the union contract. And he bragged about 10,000 jobs Walmart was planning to create, which had already been announced in October 2016.
Moving along to February, Trump announced that “Intel just announced that it will move ahead with a new plant in Arizona that probably was never going to move ahead with,” but, ProPublica explains, “Intel originally announced, in 2011, plans to build the facility but held off until it saw sufficient demand.” (Which two weeks of Donald Trump in office did not create.)
In March, Trump wanted credit for 45,000 ExxonMobil jobs. In reality, “The investment plan began in 2013, and several of the components have already been completed.” Later in March, Trump claimed credit for just over 21,000 jobs at three companies—just 220 of which were new jobs while the other 20,800 or so had already been planned.
October saw Trump bragging about the creation of 1,000 already-planned jobs at DENSO in Tennessee. And just this month, Trump claimed that his washing machine tariff would be responsible for the creation of 600 new jobs, when those jobs were already planned and the company said some of them might be cut because of the tariff.
Those are just the jobs—nearly 100,000 of them—that were already planned before Trump had any influence on policy. ProPublica also lines up a couple million jobs that have been promised but not created, or might come later maybe possibly, or would come, if they came, from indirect economic impact.
So when Trump starts bragging about jobs in the State of the Union, there’s a big part of the context. Most of the rest of the context, of course, is in the employment trends that have stayed pretty darn consistent over the past year, following the pattern the Obama years had already set.