YORK, Pa. — In the type of city he once promised to set on an explosive path to economic growth, Donald Trump laid out a vague economic agenda for a second term and claimed a Kamala Harris presidency would unleash a “big-league depression” across the nation.
“Kamala Harris is an economy-wrecker and a country-destroyer,” Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, told what appeared to be a relatively small audience in the historic brick warehouse of Pennsylvania machining manufacturer Precision Custom Components. “Now she wants to be promoted to job-killer-in-chief.”
Trump described a dystopian future under Harris, peppered with lies and exaggerations about the vice president’s plans and record. He claimed the first Black and South Asian woman to run as the Democratic presidential nominee was “on a regulatory jihad,” adding, “Kamala stands for energy disappearance and energy obliteration,” as he stood next to a banner reading, “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!”
In Trump’s hourlong speech, he made many of the same promises he made in 2016 and 2020 about bringing back manufacturing and offshored jobs.
The former president said he would cut energy costs in half during the first year of his administration, but didn’t explain how he’d achieve that goal. He claimed he’d create dozens of new power plants — again, without specifics. He said he would end President Joe Biden’s electric vehicle mandate (which Trump has discussed before). And he endorsed slashing taxes for working Americans and heaping taxes on foreign manufacturers. “This will help us end inflation and make America affordable,” he said.
In a state where fracking is a hot-button issue, Trump repeatedly pointed out that Harris has supported fracking bans. He also accused her of copying his proposal for eliminating taxes on tips in her own economic blueprint. “She says the same thing, exactly the same words I used,” Trump complained.
Pennsylvania is a key swing state where candidates often tailor their economic messages to reflect the state’s energy and manufacturing economies. Harris has improved on Biden’s position there as the presumptive nominee, running slightly ahead of Trump.
However, voters generally trust Trump more on the economy, even though his first term resulted in a complicated economic legacy that included soaring debt. Trump has also overstated how many factory jobs were created on his watch.
Monday’s event was not billed as a MAGA rally. The former president spoke in York’s urban downtown, which has a mix of well-kept Victorians alongside blighted properties with boarded-up windows. The city, which used to rely on a manufacturing economy, has lost 15,000 residents since its population heyday in 1950, though it began slowly rebounding in 2000. Roughly 67% of its population is nonwhite.
“These folks are not from here,” said Jody Trimmer, 62, eying the line of mostly white invited guests from across the street. Trimmer, a Democrat, said she lives down the street from the Precision factory where Trump was speaking. “The city population has a lot of Black people, and I don’t see very many,” she said.
Trimmer was one of the few people in the vicinity of the plant who showed up in a “Harris 2024” T-shirt. She said most of her neighbors are Democrats. “I think [Trump] doesn’t care about any of these people here. I think he’s for himself and the rich,” Trimmer said.
Trump supporter Ed Lehigh, a 73-year-old who lives 10 miles outside York, said Harris’ economic policy agenda would “totally bankrupt the country.” As for what might unleash the most economic growth for York and the surrounding areas, Lehigh said “not price fixing, that’s what Kamala is for. Let America run, let the farmers do what they do, let the machiners do what they do, and stop the regulations.”
Asked why Trump’s policies didn’t fix the economy during his first four years in office, Lehigh said, “They can’t rapidly change. Nothing does.”
Harris laid out her economic vision for the country last week. It included a federal ban cracking down on grocery price gouging and $25,000 in downpayment assistance for new homebuyers, among other measures aimed at making housing more affordable but that critics contend would make consumer goods and housing more expensive.
A couple who provided only their first names, Jane and Brian, said they feared for the economy under Harris and longed for the days when they said things were better, under Trump.
“When Biden got in, he did away with everything, everything that President Trump stood for and was doing,” Jane said, sitting on a porch with peeling paint across the street from Trump’s event. It wasn’t her house — she said she’d long ago left the city due to crime and high taxes. “Our Founding Fathers laid out a plan for this country, and we have just gotten away from that,” she said.