What Happened to All the Jobs Trump Promised?

Since the election, President Trump has made 31 specific claims about companies adding or saving American jobs thanks to his intervention. We went back to see what’s become of those announcements.

President Trump has made many claims promising that individual companies such as Amazon, Alibaba and Boeing will hire large – and specific – numbers of American workers, a total of 2.4 million in all.

We found that only about 206,000 of those jobs have been created so far.

Roughly 136,000 of those were genuinely new positions, as opposed to slots that were planned before the presidential election.

And some 63,000 of them are potentially attributable to Trump, according to the companies that did the hiring.

Remember the Carrier deal right after the election? Trump claimed he had saved 1,100 jobs in the company’s Indiana operations from being moved to Mexico. Putting aside the fact that he counted 300 positions that were never at risk, Carrier received $7 million in grants and tax breaks from the state of Indiana, and still laid off more than 500 people.

Here's another example. Just before Trump took office, Alibaba chief Jack Ma stood with the president-elect and promised 1 million U.S. jobs.

But there’s no sign any Americans were actually hired. The Chinese e-commerce giant wasn’t planning to build facilities or hire coders in the U.S; it’s trying to recruit American merchants to use its platform with the expectation that those companies would then hire more people. Alibaba wouldn’t comment on its progress.

Trump claimed his trip to Saudi Arabia in May would create “ millions ” of American jobs.

But no jobs were actually created. Lockheed Martin told ProPublica that 18,000 may eventually materialize if preliminary agreements proceed. Other companies that signed deals on the trip, such as Boeing and GE, couldn’t provide even estimates of potential hires.

In October, Trump hosted a signing ceremony for a big order of Boeing jets and said it would create 70,000 jobs.

But the company isn’t planning such a hiring spree. A Boeing spokeswoman said the number is just an estimate – using a generic formula and the sticker price of the planes – of indirect jobs that may be supported or sustained.

Explore these claims for yourself. We confirmed all figures with company representatives and presented the results to the White House, which had no comment.

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/trump-job-promises