Donald Trump took a tour of an Apple manufacturing facility in Texas alongside CEO Tim Cook. While impeachment hearings continued in D.C., the president tweeted that “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America.” While Apple did claim in September that exemptions from tariffs the Trump Administration put in place made it possible to produce the new Mac Pro in Texas, a company called Flex has been assembling its high-end desktop computer there since 2013.
Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America. Today Nancy Pelosi closed Congress because she doesn’t care about American Workers!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2019
“We’re seeing the beginning of a very powerful and important plant,” Trump said at the factory. “Anybody that followed my campaign, I would always talk about Apple, that I want to see Apple building plants in the United States. And that’s what’s happening.”
This is not true for a couple reasons — one of them nitpicky and one of them a lot more serious. The nitpicky problem is that Apple isn’t actually building a manufacturing plant. The company is building a new campus in Austin, but it’s miles away from the factory and the jobs are going to be very similar to the kind of white-collar design and engineering work that Apple does in Cupertino. Apple doesn’t do its own manufacturing, and the plant Trump is standing in belongs to a contractor called Flex Ltd (formerly Flextronics).
Trump is talking as if Apple has created a brand-new factory in Texas to build Mac Pros. If all you saw was a five-second clip on the news, that’s probably the impression you would get but it just isn’t true.
You can see the video footage of Trump’s tour for yourself below.
