Trump Is Pretending to Create Jobs in Key Midterm States

Will voters in Iowa and Alaska fall for his fake steel mill and gas pipeline?

The political ascent of Donald Trump has forced me to adjust upward my estimation of the American public’s gullibility. That Trump is a fraud is something I would have been able to perceive when I was 7 years old. Yet Americans twice elected him president. If I possessed the ability at age 7 to see through Trump (and I was no kind of prodigy), then gullibility about Trump can’t logically be a matter of his base lacking a college education (“I love the poorly educated”). Rather, it reflects the public’s perverse attraction to promises it understands to be hollow. As the former TNR editor Michael Kinsley observed way back in 2008, “The routine acceptance of obvious lies now corrodes our politics as much as … money.” 

Trump does Kinsley one better by attaching his obvious lies to promises of money. The most ludicrous example is Trump’s pledge, restated this week, to give every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep their majorities in the House and Senate. Set aside that this is essentially a bribe for votes; it’s also never going to happen because doing so would cost $1.3 trillion. Trump has a history of pledging to send out money that never arrives. Last year he promised $2,000 rebates to compensate American families for his tariffs. That didn’t happen. Neither did his promise last year to share 20 percent of DOGE savings with U.S. citizens (possibly because DOGE saved no money at all, but rather added $244 billion to the federal deficit). 

Now Trump is claiming fictional economic development projects to be underway in two states where Republicans are at risk of losing Senate seats. These are Iowa (where Republican Representative Ashley Hinson is in a dead heat with Democratic state Representative Josh Turek) and Alaska (where incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan is trailing Democratic former Representative  Mary Peltola).

The make-believe project in Iowa is a $15 million Mesabi Metallics steel mill that will create 1,750 jobs (plus 6,000 temporary construction jobs) in Iowa’s Lee County, where Republican Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks may also lose her seat. A White House press release called it “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States” and posted a Des Moines........

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