Valley Dems to Trump: You broke promises

By DAVID SKOLNICK

skolnick@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

On the two-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s rally at the Covelli Centre, in which he urged people “don’t sell your house” because jobs were returning, Democrats criticized the Republican president for breaking his promises to the area.

Braylin Rushton of Campbell, a laid-off Lordstown General Motors worker, said when Trump gave tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations, he “made it easy” for GM to idle the local plant.

Rushton said Trump isn’t “solely responsible” for the closing of the facility, and when asked what the president could do, he said, “Honestly, I’m not sure.”

But Rushton said Trump’s comments about the Lordstown closing have been “very insensitive.”

In December 2018, Trump said on Fox News about the idling of Lordstown GM: “It doesn’t really matter because Ohio is, under my leadership from a national standpoint, Ohio’s going to replace those jobs in like two minutes.”

Rushton was part of a Wednesday news conference outside the former Northside Regional Medical Center on Gypsy Lane, organized by the Ohio Democratic Party.

Party Chairman David Pepper said Trump “keeps breaking his promises” to the Mahoning Valley and hasn’t done anything to help it as it experiences the closing of businesses including Northside and GM and the impending Aug. 31 closure of The Vindicator.

Pepper said Trump put policies in place, such as the tax cuts that “made it easier to send jobs overseas, policies that support corporations and not workers.”

The party is paying for three billboards in the area that criticize Trump as well as yard signs and online advertising.

Trump told a crowd of about 7,000 at the Covelli Centre on July 25, 2017: “I rode through your beautiful roads coming up from the airport, and I was looking at some of those big, once incredible job-producing factories, and my wife, Melania, said, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘Those jobs have left Ohio.’

“They’re all coming back. They’re all coming back. Don’t move. Don’t sell your house. ... Do not sell it. We’re going to get those values up. We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build brand new ones. It’s going to happen.”

Jane Timken, Ohio Republican Party chairwoman said, “What Democrats fail to understand is that we have record low unemployment, over 17,000 new manufacturing jobs created in Ohio alone, and nationally over 6 million jobs created since President Trump took office. In Mahoning County alone, unemployment has fallen by almost 2 percent since President Trump took office.”

The county’s unemployment rate was 7.5 percent in January 2017 and 5.7 percent last month.