Vance repeats a bogus Trump claim on ‘factories’ debunked years ago

“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, 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.