Tag: Trump broken promises to working Americans

Will Trump’s Broken Promises to Working-Class Voters Cost Him the Election?

Last December, Bob Kemper, the grievance chairman of United Steelworkers Local 1299, was summoned to a conference room at Great Lakes Works, a U.S. Steel plant just south of Detroit. A cohort of senior managers told Kemper and three other union officers that the automotive industry, which buys almost all of the plant’s steel, was cutting its car production. With reduced demand for its product, most of Great Lakes would be “indefinitely idled.” Kemper knew this meant that members were getting laid off, but the terminology was unfamiliar. “Our contract says the facility has to be declared shut down in order for our members to get a severance,” Kemper told me. “We were trying to figure out what the fuck ‘indefinitely idled’ means.”

Nearly a thousand workers have since lost their jobs. The layoffs came at an inauspicious time for Donald Trump, who won the Presidency, in 2016, by flipping Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by a combined total of seventy-seven thousand votes. (His winning margin in Michigan, barely ten thousand votes, was the slimmest of any state.) Two days before Election Day, Trump had held a rally in Macomb County, Michigan, a national bellwether for the white working-class voters who were once known as Reagan Democrats. “We are going to stop the jobs from going to Mexico and China and all over the world,” Trump said. “We will make Michigan into the manufacturing hub of the world once again.” A Republican Presidential candidate had not won Macomb County since 2004; Trump carried it by nearly fifty thousand votes. View the post here.

Trump’s Economy: 7 Broken Promises to Working Americans

Center for American Progress logoIn 2016, Donald Trump vowed to champion forgotten Americans and take on the entrenched interests that he blamed for hollowing out the middle class. He categorically promised “no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid,” and he said he would stop Wall Street from “getting away with murder”; end the outsourcing of American jobs; insure everyone with lower health care costs; and close tax loopholes for people like himself and to focus tax relief on the middle class. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington.

In office, however, President Trump’s administration has broken each of these promises, betraying the people he said he would fight for. In virtually every policy sphere, his administration has favored powerful corporations and the wealthy at the expense of middle- and working-class Americans. Trump’s broken promises have had real-life consequences for American families: less economic security; lower wages; more expensive health care; greater threats to Social Security and Medicare; and a widening gap between working Americans and the wealthy and powerful.

As President Trump prepares to give his third State of the Union address, here are seven ways his administration has broken his core economic promises and how they have let down ordinary Americans.