One of the highlights of President Trump’s Make America Great Again rally in Lebanon, Ohio, Friday night was the news on jobs, and particularly manufacturing jobs.
For a rust-belt state like Ohio, the Trump administration’s two-year focus on fair trade and deregulation has helped both the steel and coal industries.
The coal business was all but dead under Obama. He killed it, Trump said, driving many mines into bankruptcy. Coal has stabilized but still has a ways to go if it is going to fend off all of the government-subsidized alternative energies such as solar power.
Steel, though, is “hot as a pistol,” Trump said. And that’s due solely to Trump playing hardball with the nations that dump steel on the U.S. While Obama gave a wink and a nod, Trump will slap them with costly tariffs.
Trump recalled the defeatist expression from the Obama years: “If you remember the previous administration said manufacturing jobs, they’re gone, they’re dead. You’d need a magic wand to bring them back,” Trump said. “I guess we have the magic wand. They’re coming back.”
GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel picked on this in her tweets during the rally.
Under President Obama: 303,000 manufacturing jobs lost ⬇️
Under President Trump: 396,000 manufacturing jobs gained ⬆️“Remember the expression, ‘You’d need a magic wand to bring them back’? I guess we have the magic wand!” – @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/4ddQBnJMg0
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) October 13, 2018
McDaniel issued another tweet that put the Trump administration’s manufacturing job machine in crystal-clear perspective.
In the first 21 months of @realDonaldTrump, 396,000 manufacturing jobs were created.
That pace is 10 TIMES faster than the last 21 months of President Obama, who said you’d need a “magic wand” to bring those jobs back.
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) October 12, 2018
Trump said they were coming back from Mexico, from Canada from other countries. “Because they all wanna be where the action is. It’s where the jobs are. We are now the hottest country in the world.”
One sector that is coming back particularly strong, the president said, is steel.
Trump said Ohio’s steel mills, which had been severely hampered by cheap foreign imports under the Obama administration, are churning again.
“All over Ohio steel mills are reopening and we’ve put our coal miners back to work,” he said.
“When I came into office steel was a dead business. Now Nucor, U.S. Steel, they’re opening mills all over the country. We’re taxing the dumpers, you know they dump steel on our country. So we’re going to have beautiful, new, American-made steel. It’s not going to be mud or sand steel, they put garbage in it, we don’t even know what is in it [overseas]. We’re going to have American-made steel with iron ore from America. We don’t need outsiders telling us about our steel industries. It’s incredible what’s happening. Steel is hot as a pistol. After decades of rebuilding others we are finally rebuilding our nation.”
Trump said all of this progress will be gone, setting Ohio back into the economic doldrums of the Obama years, if Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker of the House and Chuck Schumer becomes majority leader of the Senate. A truly cringe-worthy thought for the president, who, by the way, would likely also be impeached of the Democrats ride a blue wave Nov. 6 to majorities in both houses.
That’s why Trump asked Ohioans to vote early for GOP candidates, including Jim Ranacci for U.S. Senate, Rep. Steve Chabot in House district 1, Rep. Mike Turner in District 10, Rep. Dave Joyce in District 14, and Rep. Troy Balderson in District 12.
Trump also talked up Mike DeWine for governor, who is running against Obama ally Richard Cordray, who Trump called “a very bad guy.”
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Anthony Accardi is a writer and reporter for The Ohio Star.\
