- Trump pushed for the plant in 2017 as part of his ‘America First’ agenda
- It went bankrupt when Foxconn drastically scaled back its plans.
- Now Microsoft promises 2,300 unionized construction jobs and a similar number of permanent jobs.
President Joe Biden flew to battleground Wisconsin on Wednesday, where he trashed a planned $10 billion factory once touted by Donald Trump as a “scam” and ridiculed his predecessor for pushing it.
He ridiculed Trump in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, for applauding the massive factory project in Racine and declaring it the “eighth wonder of the world” while announcing a new Microsoft facility on the same site.
‘He and his administration promised a $10 billion investment by Foxconn to build a new manufacturing complex and create 13,000 new jobs. In fact, he came here with Senator Ron Johnson, literally holding a golden shovel, promising to build the eighth wonder of the world. Are you kidding me?’ Biden asked, earning laughter from a crowd of supporters.
‘Look what happened. They dug a hole with those golden shovels,” President Biden said in Wisconsin, where he criticized Donald Trump for bragging about a giant Foxconn manufacturing plant that went down.
‘Look what happened. They dug a hole with those golden shovels… and then they fell into it.
Look, they didn’t shovel other dirt, they did shovel some dirt. 100 houses were demolished. They wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of your state and local taxes to promise a project that never came to fruition. Foxconn turned out to be precisely a scam.
“Imagine,” he said.
Trump had announced the plan with great fanfare in 2017 as part of his ‘America First’ agenda, but the Taiwanese firm reduced it drastically a few years later, citing “market fluctuations.”
Trump leads Biden in the battleground state by half a percentage point in the latest RealClearPolitics average, in a state that Trump won in 2016 but that Biden took from him in 2020.
Trump praised the planned investment as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”
Biden attacked his rival in a state where Trump has a narrow lead in the polls
Biden later met with campaign volunteers at the Dr. John Bryant Community Center.
Biden took selfies with campaign volunteers as his re-election effort announced it was expanding, fueled by his repeated cash grabs.
In Wisconsin, as in battlegrounds Michigan and Pennsylvania, Biden suffers from diminished youth support, concerns about maintaining the support of Black voters he enjoyed in 2020 and divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza.
He plans to meet with volunteers as his campaign, which is ramping up staff and offices, announced a new $14 million ad buy.
Now Microsoft is promising 2,300 union construction jobs and a similar number of permanent jobs to run a data center there.
Microsoft President Brad Smith told the AP that the company had a “steadfast commitment to under-promising and over-delivering” and praised the Biden administration for its role. Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil (R) said Biden doesn’t want to talk about his inflation policies.