A Washington Post fact-check shredded Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance on Wednesday after he repeated a Donald Trump falsehood that the ex-president built 12,000 factories in his four years in office.
"If you go back to the Trump presidency, we had 12,000 factories that were built during Donald Trump’s presidency," Vance told "Meet the Press" in a Sunday interview.
According to Glenn Kessler, "This is an especially bogus figure."
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The concept of a "factory" summons an image of people going to work in a warehouse with smokestacks and clocking in, the piece describes. But that's not the definition Trump worked with — 80 percent of the so-called “manufacturing establishments” Trump claims to have created employ five people or fewer.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines any establishment “engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products," the Post explained.
It effectively means establishments “that transform materials or substances into new products by hand or in the worker’s home and those engaged in selling to the general public products made on the same premises from which they are sold, such as bakeries, candy stores, and custom tailors."
An Etsy "shop" would be a "factory" under Trump's definition.
The Post also cited the fact that the data isn't even the recent, more flattering. The comment comes from Trump's State of the Union Address in 2020, before COVID-19 shut down the country. For his whole presidency, the number would be 18,000 "manufacturing establishments."
Trump's biggest problem, however, is that President Joe Biden can claim a nearly 39,000 gain in his presidency.
