MINNEAPOLIS – Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz did a series of interviews this week, including a stop on “The View.”
In that appearance, the governor blamed former President Donald Trump for the loss of the most manufacturing jobs in American history.
“We know that Donald Trump has lost more manufacturing jobs than any president in American history,” Walz said. “That’s just factual.”
While technically and factually true, it is misleading and taken out of context.
Walz leaves out one little thing: the deadly 2020 pandemic that shut down the entire economy.
A chart showing U.S. manufacturing jobs from Obama to Trump and Biden shows that manufacturing jobs rose under Trump. Suddenly the bright red jobs line plummets and all those jobs collapse when COVID hits.
In fact, the U.S. lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs during the first and worst pandemic months of 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By the end of the year, 775,000 of those jobs returned, but the numbers never returned to pre-pandemic levels before Trump left office.
Another thing to note is that manufacturing employment has declined since the late 1970s. The US had almost 20 million jobs at the time, but was losing manufacturing work to foreign countries and to automation.
There are now approximately 13 million jobs in the industry.
Pat Kessler
