How NAFTA Broke American Politics

Trump returned to a long-running theme: the terrifying specter of deindustrialization. “Right now, as we speak, large factories just started, are being built across the border in Mexico.” Trump blamed the U.A.W. for “allowing this to happen” and said the union’s president, Shawn Fain, who endorsed Biden and Kamala Harris, “should be fired immediately.” He concluded by saying: “To all of the forgotten men and women who have been neglected, abandoned and left behind, you will be forgotten no longer.”

Hayes, who typically votes Democratic, said: “They’re using things like NAFTA as leverage. But they’ve always done that.”

Oren Cass, the head of American Compass, a conservative think tank, who is also a former adviser to Mitt Romney, is the intellectual leader of the “pro-worker” faction in the Republican Party, which includes JD Vance. He recently wrote a mea culpa in The Times for ignoring working-class suffering and denounced the long stagnation of American wages. Yet Cass contributed to the chapter on labor in the Project 2025 initiative, a set of conservative policy proposals for the next Republican administration. It encourages Congress to consider banning public-employee unions, roll back child-labor protections and restrict overtime pay. Trump and Vance each oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which has languished in Congress and would make it easier to form a union. The Trump administration threatened to veto the bill and said it would “kill jobs and destroy the gig economy.”

While Trump has made gestures toward labor — the convention gave a prime-time slot to Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, who denounced “greedy employers” and praised Trump for listening to critical voices, though he didn’t endorse him — his record as president tells another story. In 2017, at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, which lost some 50,000 well-paying steelworker jobs over the previous 40 years, Trump promised that all the empty factories would be “coming back.” Two years later, the last large plant in the area, a G.M. factory that had recently employed nearly 5,000 people, closed. During Trump’s presidency, the trade deficit grew to its highest level since 2008, and his 2017 tax cuts incentivized corporations to offshore jobs by lowering the tax rates on foreign profits. According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, more than 300,000 jobs were lost to offshoring and trade during his presidency.

Perhaps nothing is more symbolic of Trump’s failed promise to bring back manufacturing jobs than the deal he made in 2018 with Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer of iPhones and other Apple products, to build a campus near Milwaukee. Trump said the factory would be the “eighth wonder of the world,” and he broke ground for its construction using a gold-plated shovel alongside Representative Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, and Scott Walker. The deal was predicated on $4.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Foxconn, which promised to create 13,000 jobs, has so far created only 1,000.