A year into his administration, 90% of the jobs President Trump promised to create haven’t materialized, a new analysis finds.
Trump has made 31 specific claims that companies will add or save American jobs because of his administration. Those claims — involving companies such as Amazon and Boeing — amount to 2.4 million jobs. Only 206,000 of those jobs have been created so far, ProPublica reports. About 136,000 of those jobs were genuinely new positions, and 63,000 of them were potentially attributable to Trump, according to the companies did the hiring.
Befitting his marketing background, Trump attracts headlines and TV coverage for grand hiring promises made by companies and celebrity CEOs — or just by himself. But the progress doesn’t match the press. After Trump’s election, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma appeared with the president-elect and promised 1 million American jobs. “But there’s no sign any Americans were actually hired,” says ProPublica. “The Chinese e-commerce giant wasn’t planning to build facilities or hire coders in the U.S; it’s trying to recruit American merchants to use its platform with the expectation that those companies would then hire more people.”
In October, Trump said Boeing would create 70,000 jobs. In reality, a Boeing spokesperson said it was an “estimate using a generic formula” of “indirect jobs that might be supported or sustained.”
Trump has a history of taking credit for saving or adding jobs that were already planned. In October, on Jan. 4, 2017, he tweeted thanks to Ford for “creating 700 new jobs in the U.S.” and “this is just the beginning.” Ford had already planned to add those jobs per its 2015 union contract. On Jan. 9, 2017, he did the same for Fiat, thanking them for 2,000 jobs. That company’s decision had also been made in 2015 and had nothing to do with Trump, a company spokesperson said. The CEO of Lockheed Martin said that he took a meeting with Trump, in which he told the president about 1,800 planned hires, part of the F35 fighter jet program which was already part of the Pentagon’s budget. Trump then took credit for adding 2,000 jobs, criticizing “the fake news” in a tweet: “Ask top CEO’s of those companies for real facts. Came back because of me!”
Totally biased @NBCNews went out of its way to say that the big announcement from Ford, G.M., Lockheed & others that jobs are coming back…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2017
In recent weeks, companies that Trump asserted would save or add jobs, or that he utilized for photo ops, announced that they would in fact conduct layoffs or plant closures. On Monday, Harley-Davidson, whose motorcycles Trump displayed on the White House lawn as part of his jobs pitch, announced it would close a plant in Kansas City, eliminating 800 jobs in the area. Carrier conducted layoffs at an Indianapolis plant Trump touted as a place where he’d save jobs, letting 215 people go. This month, Wal-Mart closed 63 Sam’s Club stores and plans 3,500 more layoffs of Wal-Mart co-managers. On Jan. 24, a printing company spun off from Fortune 500 company R.R. Donnelly & Sons closed its Minnesota plant, shedding 216 jobs, and Coca-Cola announced it would close a bottling plant in Oklahoma in March, resulting in 246 layoffs.
And despite Trump’s much-publicized promises to bring jobs back to the coal industry, the sector only added 500 jobs in 2017, or a 1% rise. And a West Virginia mine closure announced on Jan. 10 will cut 370 jobs, wiping out most of those gains.
