Vance repeats a bogus Trump claim on ‘factories’ debunked years ago
“If you go back to the Trump presidency, we had 12,000 factories that were built during Donald Trump’s presidency.”
— Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, in remarks on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Aug. 25
Vance, in defending former president Donald Trump’s proposal for across-the-board tariffs, argued that Trump managed to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas when he was president. He then cited as evidence a statistic that immediately gave us PTSD.
“12,000 factories” — we’d fact-checked this falsehood during the Trump administration. Trump said it 15 times during his presidency, according to our database of false and misleading claims, including in the 2020 State of the Union address. He began making this claim after reports that, before the covid pandemic, the manufacturing sector was entering a recession.
But this is an especially bogus figure.
The Facts
“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.” The BLS considers any establishment “engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.” So that also means establishments “that transform materials or substances into new products by hand or in the worker’s home and those engaged in selling to the general public products made on the same premises from which they are sold, such as bakeries, candy stores, and custom tailors.”
It’s also strange that Vance would rely on an outdated Trump statistic. As we mentioned, Trump included this in the 2020 State of the Union address, and it represented the period from the first quarter of 2017 to the third quarter of 2019.
For all of Trump’s presidency, the figure would be nearly 18,000 additional “manufacturing establishments.” But here’s the rub: Through the first quarter of this year, President Joe Biden could claim a gain of nearly 39,000 during his tenure.
A Vance spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The Pinocchio Test
It says something about the quality of Trump campaign research that Vance would need to reach back to an outdated claim debunked four years ago. These aren’t really factories — and Trump’s record on this statistic fares poorly compared with Biden’s.
Vance earns Four Pinocchios.
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