In his address to Congress, President Trump got it terribly wrong and was hugely hypocritical to assail the bipartisan CHIPS Act as a “horrible, horrible thing.” He claimed, “We give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn’t mean a thing. They take our money and they don’t spend it.”
The 2022 law (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) he flails is doing more to rebuild American manufacturing than anything Trump did in his first four years in power — when he claimed getting factories humming again was a central priority but did precious little to actually make that happen in a sustainable way.
First, some context that’s crucial to understand, especially for Republicans who claim Democrats eviscerate manufacturing jobs while the GOP has a knack for creating them. After manufacturing jobs took a huge dip in the wake of the Great Recession from 2009-2010, they steadily grew on President Barack Obama’s watch, from around 11.5 million to 12.3 million.
Then they kept growing during Trump’s first four years, to about 12.8 million — before COVID hit, the bottom fell out of the economy and they plummeted to about 11.4 million. They finally climbed back up to 12.2 million jobs by the end of Trump’s term, meaning he ended his term with fewer manufacturing jobs than he started.
Under President Joe Biden, the gains in factory employment were bigger and more sustained, going up to 13 million jobs.
There are lots of reasons why that happened, chief among them the Inflation Reduction Act, but the CHIPS and Science Act played a role. Passed in the summer of 2022, it sparked nearly a half-trillion dollars in private investments — investments expected to create more than 50,000 high-paying jobs and a robust semiconductor production supply chain.
Those jobs are just the start; each position supports another five jobs in the wider economy. The bill has also awarded billions in grants and loans that are projected to create another 145,000 jobs. Under CHIPS, Micron is investing $100 billion for a new plant near Syracuse.
CHIPS gives the U.S. a fighting chance to compete with China and Taiwan in a sector that everyone and his sister knows is absolutely crucial to global competitiveness.
It’s ironic indeed that a Republican Party that led the freakout over TikTok, and that routinely fearmongers about other Chinese investment, now wants to cede this most essential economic terrain to America’s chief competitor.
Not long ago, a man named Donald Trump rose to the presidency excoriating Democrats for supposedly kissing away factories and their jobs to Mexico and China. He claimed China had perpetrated one of the “greatest thefts in the history of the world.” He promised to return factories and their jobs from overseas with a much more robust, America-first industrial policy.
Today, Trump champions tariffs that punish American consumers who look to buy products made in other countries — risking putting the economy in a tailspin in the process — while threatening to torpedo the very investments that would build up our domestic manufacturing capacity so that we can actually buy things that are made here.
It makes absolutely no sense. But of course, Trump isn’t about making sense. He’s about finding enemies he can rail against, and creating chaos, and then blaming the enemies he created for that very chaos. He knows how to manufacture one thing and one thing only: outrage.