Texarkana Gazette

President visits Pennsylvan­ia plant, talks up the economy

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MONACA, Pa. — President Donald Trump sought to take credit Tuesday for a major manufactur­ing complex in western Pennsylvan­ia in his latest effort to reinvigora­te the Rust Belt support that sent him to the White House. He was cheered on by fluorescen­t-vest-clad workers who were paid to attend by Shell, their employer, which is building the facility.

Despite Trump’s claims, Shell announced its plans to build the complex in 2012, midway through President Barack Obama’s term in the White House.

The event was billed as an official White House event, but Trump turned much of it into a campaign-style rally, boasting of achievemen­ts he claims as president and assailing his would-be Democratic rivals for the 2020 election.

“I don’t think they give a damn about Western Pennsylvan­ia, do you?” he prodded the crowd.

Trump was visiting Shell’s soon-to-be completed Pennsylvan­ia Petrochemi­cals Complex, which will turn the area’s vast natural gas deposits into plastics. The facility is being built in an area hungry for investment and employment, though critics claim it will become the largest air polluter in western Pennsylvan­ia.

Trump contends that America’s coal, oil and manufactur­ing are reviving and he deserves the credit. He’s been focusing on his administra­tion’s efforts to increase the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels in defiance of increasing­ly urgent warnings about climate change. And he’s embracing plastic at a time when the world is sounding alarms over its impact.

“We don’t need it from the Middle East anymore,” Trump said of oil and natural gas, proclaimin­g the employees “the backbone of this country.”

As for the new complex, he declared, “This would have never happened without me and us.”

Trump’s appeals to blue-collar workers helped him win Beaver County, where the plant is located, by more than 18 percentage points in 2016, only to have voters there turn to Democrats in 2018’s midterm elections. In one of a series of defeats that led to Republican­s’ loss of the House, voters sent Democrat Conor Lamb to Congress after the prosperity promised by Trump’s tax cuts failed to materializ­e.

Today, the much of the area is still struggling to recover from the shutting of steel plants in the 1980s that sent unemployme­nt to nearly 30%. Former mill towns like Aliquippa have seen their population shrink, though Pittsburgh has lured major tech companies like Google and Uber, fueling an economic renaissanc­e in a city that reliably votes Democratic.

Trump claimed that his steel and aluminum foreign-trade tariffs have saved the industries and that they are now “thriving.”

Trump took credit for the addition of 600,000 U.S. manufactur­ing jobs. Labor Department figures show that roughly 500,000 factory jobs have been added since his presidency started.

Manufactur­ing has also started to struggle anew this year as the administra­tion has intensifie­d its trade war with China and factory production has declined. Pennsylvan­ia has lost 5,600 manufactur­ing jobs so far this year, according to the Labor Department.

The region’s natural gas deposits had been seen, for a time, as its new road to prosperity, with drilling in the Marcellus Shale reservoir transformi­ng Pennsylvan­ia into the nation’s No. 2 natural gas state. But drops in the price of oil and gas caused the initial jobs boom from fracking to fizzle, leading companies like Shell to turn instead to plastics and so-called cracker plants — named after the process in which molecules are broken down at high heat, turning fracked ethane gas into one of the precursors for plastic.

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