WaPo:
Trump said he would save jobs at Carrier. The layoffs start July 20.
By Danielle Paquette - May 24, 2017
This story has been updated to include Carrier's response
Carrier, the company President Trump pledged to keep on American soil, informed the state of Indiana this week that it will soon begin cutting 632 workers from an Indianapolis factory. The manufacturing jobs will move to Monterrey, Mexico, where the minimum wage is $3.90 per day.
That was never supposed to happen, according to Trump's campaign promises. He told Indiana residents at a rally last year there was a "100 percent chance” he would save the jobs at the heating and air-conditioning manufacturer.
About 1,400 positions were on the chopping block, per company estimates. Over the past year, Trump has claimed he could maintain at least 1,100 of those jobs in the United States. But on Monday, the company gave official notice to Indiana officials that it would start laying off workers at the factory on July 20 and keep slashing staff until approximately 800 factory employees remain.
[...] Trump’s saga with Carrier began last spring, when he declared to an Indianapolis crowd that he would stop the company from uprooting in search of cheaper labor.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Trump said at the rally. “They’re going to call me, and they are going to say, ‘Mr. President, Carrier has decided to stay in Indiana.’”
He kept going. “One hundred percent,” Trump said. “It’s not like we have an 80 percent chance of keeping them or a 95 percent. 100 percent.”
[...] A celebratory Trump visited the factory in December and announced that, thanks to his negotiating, more than 1,100 of the jobs would stay in the heartland.
“Carrier stepped it up, and now they’re keeping over 1,100 people,” Trump told an audience of cheering factory workers.
He said those numbers could go even higher, noting that United Technologies had agreed to invest roughly $16 million into updating the plant.
“And by the way, that number is going to go up substantially as they expand this area, this plant,” Trump said. “The 1,100 is going to be a minimum number.”
But later that month, Greg Hayes, chief executive of United Technologies, admitted that the $16 million investment would go toward automation.
“What that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs,” he told CNBC's Jim Cramer.
Chuck Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, which represents Carrier employees in Indianapolis, [...] told The Washington Post days later that Trump had “lied his a-- off.” He suspected the then-president-elect was including in his count design and engineering jobs that were never going to leave. Trump responded on Twitter by saying Jones had done a “terrible job” as union president.
--snip-- The headline quote comes in sequence -
“I wouldn’t even call it a deal,” Strain said. “It seemed to be that Carrier was responding to political pressure and did so in a way that allowed them to make it through a political moment.”
Trump, he said, benefited from the optics.
“The president,” Strain said, “took the opportunity to position himself as a champion of American workers.”
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Likely Trump is not the first bullshit specialist to gain the oval office. He is merely the latest; as well as the one so inept and inconsistent that his bullshit really wafts an odor. An odor of mendacity, crudly perfumed. An Ivanka brand purfume, keeping the family involved? "Smells fine," Mike Pence is quoted as saying.
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stretching it a bit, on the Pence thing - something he may have thought but no web item says he articulated the thought
- "Smells like Republican deep Indiana - etc.