Vice President JD Vance went to Michigan, a Democrat-run state that the Trump-Vance ticket won in 2024, to speak to workers at a Vantage Plastics manufacturing plant there.
Vance praised manufacturing for “generating economic opportunity in this region of our country,” adding, “If we do not protect our nation’s manufacturers, we lose a fundamental part of who we are as a people. Making things, building things, working with our hands is America’s heritage — and that heritage is alive and well in this facility.”
One of the Trump administration’s major stated goals is to bring manufacturing back to America from foreign countries and encourage a domestic boom. The workers listening to Vance’s speech certainly responded with enthusiasm to his policy proposals and ultimatums.
JD VANCE: “If we do not protect our nation’s manufacturers, we lose a fundamental part of who we are as a people. Making things, building things, working with our hands is America’s heritage — and that heritage is alive and well in this facility.” pic.twitter.com/aIatAbG66v
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) March 14, 2025
America once led the world in manufacturing, but government bureaucrats have been regulating the life out of it for decades as big businesses ship operations overseas to take advantage of cheap slave labor, particularly in anti-U.S. China.
“Now our frontier spirit would have done us little good in conquering the continent if we couldn’t manufacture the railway tracks, the steamboats, the dynamite and everything else needed to do so,” Vance argued. “American industry, American workers, famously won the Second World War. American industry took us to the moon and enabled the silicon revolution that created the most precise and sophisticated jobs imaginable in any field demanding mechanical expertise.”
Unfortunately, too many politicians and CEOs “have squandered that heritage in the United States of America” over the years. Vance said that “between the 1990s and the election of Donald Trump the first time back in 2016, this country lost 5 million good manufacturing jobs, and we saw over 90,000 American factories… shut their doors. And as I know, I don’t have to tell anyone here today, when we lose the ability to make our own stuff, we abandon a way of life, one that has sustained towns.”
The Trump administration is eager to launch a manufacturing renaissance, but that will take time, as “the last administration left us with a terrible economy,” Vance admitted. He bashed irresponsible government spending. “What did all that spending, what did all that waste and fraud get us? It got us an economy where Americans couldn’t afford to buy a home,” the VP said. But on “Jan. 20, 2025, we started a great American comeback.”
Voters wanted a “president with a simple goal to power our nation’s industrial comeback and once again, make the U.S. the world’s manufacturing superpower. And that is exactly what President Trump has sought out to do,” Vance declared. While progress may be slow at first, Vance proudly announced that “this February, the President’s first full month in office, America gained 10,000 American manufacturing jobs. Now compare that to last year, when under the Biden administration, we were losing an average of about 10,000 manufacturing jobs per month. That’s over 100,000 jobs in manufacturing lost in a single year under Joe Biden.”
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The plan now under Trump is straightforward:
Our goal is to make it easier and more affordable, to make things again in the United States of America. If you invest in America, in American jobs and American workers and in American businesses, you’re going to be rewarded. We’re going to cut your taxes, we’re going to slash regulations, and we’re going to reduce the cost of energy, to build things right here in this country that all of us love, but if you try to undercut us and build outside of our borders, the President Trump’s administration has got nothing for you. If you want to be rewarded, build in America, if you want to be penalized, build outside of America. It’s as simple as that.
For too long have foreign nations tariffed our goods and taken our jobs. Now Trump is imposing tariffs on other nations and pushing businesses to return operations to America. The new administration is also ending the Bidenomics war on gas and oil, partly by reopening “625 million acres offshore for drilling and end[ing] Biden’s disastrous ban on liquefied natural gas exports, which risks ending 90,000 American jobs and costing $250 billion for our country.”
Vance proudly touted a “historic regulatory rollback at the EPA,” which will “include the greenhouse gas reporting program, which cost us factories and power plants hundreds of millions of dollars, and that money is now going to be reinvested in American workers”. The Biden-Harris administration’s “impossible restrictions on coal and natural gas plants that account for 60% of our power” are over.
For years, Vance said, American leadership “refused to fight back when you let literal slaves make stuff cheaply and then bring it into our country,” which wrecked U.S. workers’ wages. Democrats scream, “‘How dare Donald Trump stand up for the American worker?’ I think I speak for the American worker when I say, ‘Thank God for President Trump for finally standing up for the American worker,’” Vance said. “Enough is enough … [Americans] have been ignored, and they have had a leadership that refuses to stand up for them. And that changed just seven short weeks ago.”
Besides all the serious policy analysis, Vance also used a humorous tone repeatedly throughout the speech, too, as when he joked that “it’s good to be back in God’s country. And I gotta tell you, every opportunity I get to get the hell out of Washington, D.C., that is a good day.” He also laughed about the few protestors he’d seen outside, wondering, “Don’t you all have jobs?” (Many leftist protestors are paid, so that likely is their job.)
Ultimately, Vance radiated optimism about the future of American manufacturing, which will hopefully translate into a manufacturing boom like never before.
