On Tuesday Trump stood inside the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and told the workers he’d saved them. “I imposed a 25-percent tariff on medium and heavy-duty trucks so that Mack Truck could do very well with this factory,” he said, on camera, surrounded by people who still remember what happened in early 2025. Because that’s when Mack warned it might cut up to 350 jobs at this exact plant, and blamed the tariff chaos coming out of his own White House for the call. About 170 of them got laid off. Roughly 150 were eventually recalled, which the company would like you to read as a happy ending and not as a year of mortgage panic for a few hundred families in the Lehigh Valley.
So follow the trick. He spent 2025 jacking up the cost of the steel and aluminum that goes into every truck on that line, the plant started shedding workers, the company pointed straight at his tariffs — and now he’s back on the floor a year later claiming a different tariff is the thing keeping the lights on. The arsonist returns to the scene with a garden hose and a press pool, and you’re supposed to clap. He wasn’t even there for the workers. He was there to get Ryan Mackenzie re-elected to Congress in November, using the people his trade war hurt as a backdrop, the way you’d rent a banquet hall.
The tell is that he had to pick this plant. Out of every factory in America he could have stood in front of, he chose one where his own policy already put people in the unemployment line, because the alternative was admitting the line exists. That’s the whole second-term economy in one photo op: break it, bill you for the repair, and demand a thank-you while he’s still holding the matches. The workers in that room know exactly who lit it. Hard to forget the smell.