Rep. Tim Ryan said Monday that it’s “insulting” for President Donald Trump to boast about his administration’s effect on manufacturing jobs on the same day that thousands of General Motors employees found out they were losing their jobs.
Ryan, an Ohio Democrat, was responding to comments Trump had made during a late-afternoon campaign rally in Mississippi. The President bragged that his administration had “found the magic wand” for manufacturing in the United States just hours after GM announced it’s closing plants and shedding thousands of US-based workers.
“We have a lot of companies moving in,” Trump said, adding that the number of companies making products in the US is “actually going to be increasing.”
It’s a usual stump speech line for the President, but it didn’t seem to take into account that earlier Monday GM had announced it would slash its workforce and shut production at five North American facilities in Ohio, Michigan, Maryland and Ontario, Canada.
Some 8,000 salaried employees and 6,000 hourly workers will either lose their jobs or be reassigned to other plants, industry experts say, and more layoffs are likely coming.
Ryan told Erin Burnett on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” that he found Trump’s comments “insulting to the almost 2,000 workers in our factory locally, and almost 15,000 workers in Michigan and Ohio.”
“He did not lift one finger. Sherrod Brown called him, we sent the President letters to try to get him engaged in helping us figure out what the future of this facility is,” Ryan said. A GM factory in the district Ryan represents is scheduled to close.
Ryan added Trump “has no industrial policy” and “no manufacturing policy” for the country.
