When President Trump spoke at a 2018 groundbreaking ceremony for the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin, he promised the plant would provide thousands of jobs and would be the "eighth wonder of the world." But as the New York Times' Alan Rappeport points out, the company has hired "less than a quarter of the 2,080 workers it was expected to employ last year and invested just $300 million, rather than the expected $3.3 billion."
"Foxconn’s failure to create the kind of factory powerhouse that Mr. Trump described demonstrates how the president’s promise of an American manufacturing renaissance has not always resulted in the pledged jobs or economic investment," Rappeport writes. "Mr. Trump has threatened companies like General Motors, Harley-Davidson and Carrier with backbreaking taxes and boycotts if they moved manufacturing abroad, often cajoling job promises out of those firms. But in many cases, those pledges went unfulfilled once Mr. Trump’s attention shifted elsewhere and market realities could not be ignored."
Speaking to the Washington Post, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire science and engineering professor said that Trump likes to "fly in and make a show of being involved and showing that he got something going" but comes up short on delivery, adding that he was hoping that his students might find jobs at one of Foxconn’s nearby plants that now sit vacant.
“It was frustrating for us," he said.
Read the full article over at The New York Times.