MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) – Republican Donald Trump talked trade at a shuttered New Hampshire factory on Thursday, putting a more personal spin on his vow to rip up the nation’s trade deals and impose new tariffs in an effort to revive local manufacturing jobs.
Speaking to a small, invitation-only crowd outside the closed Osram Sylvania plant, which used to manufacture lighting products, Trump again called for backing away from decades of U.S. policy that encouraged trade with other nations. The approach marks a departure from the free-trade tenants of conservative orthodoxy, and has been panned by Democrats as well as the usually Republican-friendly U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which warned it would lead to millions of job losses and a recession.
Trump used the factory, which closed in 2014 and moved some of the 139 jobs moved to a plant in Mexico, as an example of the human toll of trade deals like NAFTA. And he put the blame solely on his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and her husband, former Bill Clinton, who signed the deal.
“This legacy is largely due – and you could actually say entirely due – to NAFTA,” he said, adding: “The real Clinton Global Initiative is their economic plan to ship America’s jobs overseas.”
However, a spokesman for Osram said Thursday the company did not shift jobs to Mexico due to any free trade agreements, including NAFTA. Instead, spokesman Glen Garcia said, the shift was a response to declining demand for traditional lighting products that were produced at the Manchester, New Hampshire facility. Garcia said the company transferred production for those products to Juarez, Mexico, and Foshan, China.