He descended from the sky last Sunday in a helicopter that could have come from heaven, landing outside a hangar in Hagerstown, Md. He would talk for little more than an hour, mostly about himself, how he is “a smart guy” and “I look really good” and “I equal love.”
To chants of “build the wall!” he said he would “talk about jobs for a second, then we’re getting the hell out of here.” He made good on both promises. He closed with a vow that no more jobs would leave Maryland, and then Donald J. Trump disappeared back into the sky.
As he spoke, jobs were leaving Maryland. Credit card processors, which had found a home in a place where people used to make pipe organs and leather car seats, were “consolidating,” as they put it. The biggest company, First Data Corporation, had let people go at their big office at the edge of Hagerstown.
But these jobs were not going to Mexico. And they were not leaving because dirt-cheap operations in China could track credit cards any better than the people of Hagerstown. They left because the company wanted “to upgrade the talent and skill sets available to us,” as it said in a news release. Where would that be? Possibly somewhere in the New York metro area, the company announced in another of its disruptive moves. Essentially, the jobs were following Trump to New York. Others were disappearing. No wall could prevent that.
The root cause of all the financial lives broken by First Data — in Hagerstown, in Maitland, Fla., in Denver and on Long Island — was a buyout by a private equity firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, designed to enrich a few. It hasn’t gone so well. “Drowning in debt,” as The Wall Street Journal reported, First Data has been slashing workers to hit a stock target price after going public last year.
Trump never mentioned any of that. It’s too complicated, and nasty. The villains don’t match his narrative. And his prescriptions for winning — a trade war with China, a wall costing upward of $30 billion on the Mexican border — would do nothing to bring those jobs back to Hagerstown. Nothing.
So it goes for Trump, a traitor to the class he professes to speak for. He “loves the undereducated.” He’s a working-class hero to the angry white masses who flock to his rallies. Of all the parts Trump has been playing, this one is the phoniest.
With Trump, you can be sure of one thing: He will betray those people. We know this because he already has. Wage stagnation is the most glaring symptom of a declining middle class. Trump’s solution? He believes that “wages are too high.”Jaws dropped when he first said this at a November debate. Then he said it again, in a morning show.
Would he support raising the pathetic federal minimum wage, from the current $7.25 an hour? No. Higher wages make it hard for the United States to compete. This he knows from personal experience, outsourcing his signature products to low-wage Chinese shops. “It’s very hard to have anything in apparel made in this country,” he said with a shrug, when asked about in on CNN.
Well then, how about the maids, bartenders and food servers at his five-star hotel in Las Vegas? They’ve been protesting in front of his gilded monolith because he will not allow them to join a union, which could raise their pay an additional $3 an hour. China and Mexico are not a problem there. Other hotels in Vegas pay union wages. Las Vegas is one of the few success stories for low-skilled people looking to ride an escalator to a better life. But Trump, the working class zero, is sticking it to them.
Trump’s solution to the woes of working families is to slap a 45 percent tariff on goods coming from China. The Chinese would retaliate, of course, meaning American companies that sell aircraft, medical equipment and vehicles to China — part of the $116 billion in exports there last year — would have to cut jobs to make up for losses.
In Pittsburgh he promised to bring steel mills back. What’s left of the American steel industry has found a home in the low-wage South. But even China is losing $10 billion a year on its struggling steel industry. Manufacturing jobs are in global decline, as robots replace people. “When I’m president,” said Trump, waving his hand as if holding a magic wand, “steel is coming back to Pittsburgh!” No sane economist, or even steel industry shill, believes this.
“We can’t be fooled,” said Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., at its annual convention in Philadelphia this month. “Trump isn’t interested in solving the problems he yells about and swears about. He delivers punch lines.”
Yet they are being fooled. Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss. He fooled the folks in Maryland, a state he’s unlikely to see again in the general election. “You’re gonna remember this day,” he said, just before being lifted out of Hagerstown.
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TIMOTHY EGAN>
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