COLUMBUS — Donald Trump made five visits to Ohio in 2019, and he’s coming back to the Buckeye State next week for his first campaign stunt of 2020 — even as more than 4,000 jobs have disappeared from the state since January.
“It’s clear why Donald Trump keeps coming back to Ohio — this state is clearly in play for 2020 because of Trump’s broken promises and failed policies,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper. “With one day left in the year, 2019 is on track to be the first year since 2009 — the height of the Great Recession — that Ohio has lost jobs. Just last week, the Federal Reserve found that Donald Trump’s disastrous trade policies have resulted in manufacturing job losses, and his trade war by tweet has also hammered Ohio farmers, small businesses and consumers.”
We know that President Trump inherited a strong economy from his predecessor in office, President Barack Obama, and for a few years that strong economy continued to hum. We are now starting to see signs that Trump’s policies are slowing the economic growth.
There is no greater symbol of Trump’s ineffectiveness than the Mahoning Valley, where General Motors shut down the GM Lordstown plant in which workers had been making vehicles since 1966.
Trump visited workers during the 2016 campaign to reassure them that their jobs would be safe. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” Trump said. At the time, General Motors Lordstown was the largest private sector employer in the area with three shifts totaling more than 4,000 workers churning out GM Chevrolet products.
Fast-forward to 2019 and the GM Lordstown automobile manufacturing plant sits empty.
Families have been forced to move out of state to save their jobs and pensions and the president has offered nothing more than his condolences.
We have witnessed thousands of workers with good-paying union jobs with benefits forced to choose between leaving their homes to take jobs in different states or sticking around and hoping they can find jobs that have the same pay and benefits. There are a lot of promises right now about jobs that might or might not be coming to Lordstown and surrounding areas, but uncertainty still plagues the region.
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In the past year, Ohio lost 9,300 jobs in construction and 2,700 jobs in manufacturing. These are the jobs we need to build a robust economy, but the simple truth is Ohioans are being left behind and the economic prosperity promised by the Trump administration has not found its way to Ohio.
