DEAR EDITOR:

Donald Trump is bragging about his jobs record in the Midwest. So why didn’t he lift a finger when 14,000 GM workers were laid off?

In 2016, Trump won big in the Mahoning Valley. Voters here believed Trump when he said he would be the “greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

Four years later, it’s obvious we were duped. Under Trump, we’ve lost nearly half of the 11.6 million net jobs created under Barack Obama. That’s the worst jobs record of any modern president.

My fiancee Cheryl and I met at the General Motors plant in Lordstown. In 2014, we bought our house up the street from the plant because we believed our future with GM was bright.

Today, everything we thought was possible has been replaced by uncertainty.

When GM closed the Lords- town plant in 2019, I took a medical retirement. Cheryl moved hundreds of miles away to Tennessee to work at GM’s Spring Hill plant, leaving her daughter behind to finish high school.

This summer, GM announced it would permanently eliminate the third shift at the Spring Hill plant, laying off 680 workers. Cheryl doesn’t know how much longer she’ll have a job.

We decided to sell the house that was our American dream. Now we don’t know where we’ll live. In Ohio, where our community has been devastated by the plant closure and job opportunities are scarce? Or in Tennessee, far from our families, where the cost of living is higher and Cheryl’s job could disappear?

GM is a billion-dollar company built on the backs of workers like me and Cheryl. If we had a government that stood up to companies like GM and demanded they put their workers first, our lives wouldn’t be decided by the whims of corporate greed.

Instead, we have a president who has broken promise after promise. Trump didn’t lift a finger when GM laid off 14,000 workers across Michigan, Maryland and Ohio, including me. Instead, the Trump administration let GM continue collecting $700 million in federal contracts and massive tax breaks.

All told, nearly 1,800 factories have disappeared during the Trump administration. Even before the pandemic, job growth had plummeted in Ohio and had fallen to its lowest level in a decade next door in Michigan, the Institute for Policy Studies found recently.

America’s working people are tired of the lies and the broken promises. We won’t be fooled again.

CHUCKIE DENISON

Lake Milton