The figure he cites doesn’t actually refer to factories. And Biden’s record on
this front is better anyway.

Analysis by Glenn Kessler
August 28, 2024 at 3:55 p.m. EDT

“If you go back to the Trump presidency, we had 12,000 factories that were built
during Donald Trump’s presidency.”

— Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, lying in remarks on NBC’s “Meet
the Press,” Aug. 25

Vance, in defending former president Donald Trump’s proposal for
across-the-board tariffs, argued that Trump managed to bring back manufacturing
jobs from overseas when he was president. He then cited as evidence a statistic
that immediately gave us PTSD.

“12,000 factories” — we’d fact-checked this falsehood during the Trump
administration. Trump said it 15 times during his presidency, according to our
database of false and misleading claims (*), including in the 2020 State of the
Union address. He began making this claim after reports that, before the covid
pandemic, the manufacturing sector was entering a recession.

(*) lies

But this is an especially bogus figure.
The Facts

“Factories” conjures up images of smokestacks and production lines, but the
dataset cited by Trump — and now Vance — is not really about factories. Trump is
citing a Bureau of Labor Statistics database set known as the Quarterly Census
of Employment and Wages, which counts the number of “establishments in private
manufacturing.”

But more than 80 percent of these “manufacturing establishments” employ five or
fewer people. If those sound like pretty small factories, that’s because many
are not “factories.” The BLS considers any establishment “engaged in the
mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or
components into new products.” So that also 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.”

It’s also strange that Vance would rely on an outdated Trump statistic. As we
mentioned, Trump included this in the 2020 State of the Union address, and it
represented the period from the first quarter of 2017 to the third quarter of 2019.

For all of Trump’s presidency, the figure would be nearly 18,000 additional
“manufacturing establishments.” But here’s the rub: Through the first quarter of
this year, President Joe Biden could claim a gain of nearly 39,000 during his
tenure.

The Pinocchio Test

It says something about the quality of Trump campaign research that Vance would
need to reach back to an outdated claim debunked four years ago. These aren’t
really factories — and Trump’s record on this statistic fares poorly compared
with Biden’s.

Vance earns Four Pinocchios.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/28/vance-trump-factories-manufacturing-biden/

When Trump and Vance talk, they lie.

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Every Republiscum/QAnon accusation is, in fact, a confession