They stand with President Trump because he stood with them when no one else would.
Mr. President, I rise today to engage in this great debate that is raging across our country. Turn on the TV, read the newspapers, or open your phone and you will be overwhelmed by the back-and-forth over tariffs, trade deficits, prices, and markets. We hear the talking heads say that America simply can’t afford President Trump’s insistence on more favorable trade policies. We hear much less about whether America can afford to continue down the road we have traveled these past 30 years.
That is not a question that people in this city are asking. For many, it is not a question that appears to have occurred to them at all. The debates right now are about the future and how President Trump’s policies will shape it. That is good. These are important debates that we should have. But, today, I rise because I want to speak about the past.
I am speaking as an American but, in particular, as a proud Missourian, a boy from Bridgeton. My folks—they weren’t wealthy. My grandfather was an infantryman in World War II and returned from the war with an eighth-grade education and some money he won playing craps on the Queen Elizabeth on his way home. All of his children worked in his butcher shop growing up. Later, I remember seeing my dad work seven days a week on the midnight shift to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. He worked hard and lived honestly. And, just one generation later, look where we are.
What a remarkable story about my life—I suppose it is a remarkable story—but the truth is, it is just how unremarkable it really is in this country. That was the everyday magic of America—a country where lives like ours were not just possible but common. It was who we were. America built the modern world. Our country was forged by pilgrims, pioneers, settlers, and explorers—men whose dreams were too big for the low horizons of the Old World. Our ancestors settled a new continent, tamed a frontier, raised up a great civilization from the wilderness, and planted our flag on the Moon. It was American genius that connected the world, first through the great steam engine, spanning this continent from coast to coast, and then through the miracle of light. We gave humanity the telephone, the internet, the skyscraper, modern technology, electricity, and the industrial assembly lines that built modern civilization. Even the things we didn’t invent, we perfected. Everything that mattered happened here.
But, over the last few decades, the people in power squandered that inheritance. They sent our children and our wealth overseas to defend the borders of distant nations while throwing open our own borders to a tidal wave of mass migration here at home. They shipped the good-paying, middle-class American jobs that once were the backbone of our economy to places like Mexico and China, transforming once prosperous towns and cities into hollow shells of their former selves, often defined by addiction and death. All the while, in the forgotten corners of this land, the men and women who built this country have suffered in silence. They watch in quiet despair as their towns crumble into disrepair, their way of life disappears, and the country they love slips away from them.
The political ideal of a republic is self-reliance. As our Founding Fathers understood, the art of self-government is about people’s ability to rely on themselves. There was always trade, of course—this is a natural and good privilege of productive surplus economies—but in a republic, there was also trade between sovereign, self-sufficient communities. The citizen of the classical republic had no need for cheap trinkets, fashion, and sweatshops halfway across the globe. He and his neighbors were the ones building their homes, growing their own food, and, when necessary, taking up arms to provide for their own defense. People who depend on others for essential things cannot rule themselves, and if they cannot rule themselves, they cannot keep a republic.
Yes, times have changed. The economy of today is altogether different than the economy our ancestors knew, but that is no excuse for standing by as our home becomes a dumping ground for cheap Chinese goods. Are we really still a sovereign people today? Our independence and our sovereignty are not commodities to be sold on the global market. We can’t and won’t make everything here, but we must recover the will and the ability to make the vital necessities of our national life. Our country now depends on foreign imports for most of those necessities.
By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, more Americans now work in government than in manufacturing. Nearly half of our cars, more than 60% of our machine tools, 80% of our pharmaceuticals, and nearly 90% of the semiconductor chips we need for everything from phones to fighter jets are foreign-made. That is why the crisis that confronts us today is not merely economic. It is about Communism and slave labor versus freedom. It is about who will win the 21st century. The stakes are high. It is about the survival of our civilization. It is about the kind of nation and people we are and will be: one that creates and builds or one that simply consumes.
In this city, we tend to speak of big, sweeping abstractions—jobs, wages, deficits, growth. We talk as if these things are numbers and graphs. We forget that every job lost to China and every factory moved to Mexico belongs to a real, flesh-and-blood American, with a life and a family and a home. Each and every data point is a fellow citizen, a neighbor, a son or daughter of this great republic.
Since NAFTA, 90,000—90,000—factories in our country have closed. Think about that and what it means to those families. For the people who benefited, this was just an abstract externality. For the workers, the heartland Americans, it was everything. I know these people. These are my people—these are our people—and for too long they have walked alone. There is no memorial for their sacrifice, no national outpouring of grief for their loss, no powerful interest group to represent them in the halls of power.
Let me tell you what 30 years of so-called free and fair trade has meant for the folks where I am from. In the 1990s, our political class embraced a new line of thinking: that America could become more prosperous by opening all trade barriers regardless of how other countries treated us. The result was swift and devastating. By 2004, according to some estimates, Missouri had lost well over 31,000 jobs to foreign trade. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had cost us 12,600 Missouri jobs. By 2013, we had shipped 44,200 Missouri jobs off to China. By 2018, Missouri had lost more than 90,000 jobs in manufacturing alone—over 25% of our industrial base.
Until a few decades ago, southeast Missouri was a national hub for garment and shoe manufacturing. In the 1970s, southeast Missouri was home to as many as 90 shoe plants. The last shoe factory from that era closed for good in 2005. It had begun as a five-story, 92,000-foot international shoe plant in Cape Girardeau, nicknamed “the Pride of Southeast Missouri.” At one point, it employed 1,200 workers, but cheaper imports from low-wage countries began to flood the market, and by 1990, the old factory was razed and replaced with a one-story plant that housed roughly 300 to 500 workers. By 2001, that had dwindled down to just 50.
Here is what one former employee told a local paper after the plant closed for good:
Now I am working at the Lutheran Home, driving a van, and making a third of the amount of money I made before. My wife also has to work, and, together, we are making two-thirds of what I made alone at the shoe plant. It is very upsetting. You get mad, and then you get hurt, and you think about all the jobs leaving the country and all the people losing their jobs.
Tri-Con Industries, which makes car seat parts, shuttered its factory in Cape Girardeau, too, and moved its production to Mexico. That was another 200 jobs gone. There are patriotic shoe companies that still want to build in America. Belleville Boots took over a factory in Carthage, Missouri, in 2020. There are businesses that still love America, and they want to build on the generations of skilled craftsmen in places like southeast Missouri, but for decades, our political class has rigged the rules to punish rather than help companies that put America first. This pattern repeats again and again, and in every industry.
Up until the end of the 20th century, Missouri still had a major electronics assembly operation. Zenith Electronics—the last major American TV maker—had a large assembly plant in Springfield, Missouri. It had been in operation since just after World War II, and at one point, it employed 3,300 Missourians; but those jobs, too, had started moving to Mexico in the late 1990s. In October of 1991, Zenith shut down its plant and shipped its operation down to Mexico, taking out 1,500 Missouri jobs in one blow. In Springfield, the average worker made between 5 and 10 bucks an hour. Down in Mexico, it was just 83 cents.
The high priests of the global economy tell us that this is merely creative destruction and that other, better industries will arise to take the place of the ones that were lost. It is true that some of the workers in Springfield went on to find new jobs, but they were often much worse than the ones that they had before. Five years after Zenith shut down, laid-off workers saw an average pay cut of more than 10%. More than half of them had held multiple jobs since being laid off, two-thirds of them with worse benefits. Even the workers who enrolled in job retraining programs fared no better than the ones who didn’t.
“Those people had worked there for 20 or 25 years,” one laid-off worker recalled. “They were at the top end of the pay scales, and there weren’t any more TV repairman jobs out there.”
Toastmaster is a household name. Well, they were headquartered in Missouri, and they made their stuff in Missouri, too, with factories in small towns all across our state; but as we welcomed China into the world economy, Toastmaster began to feel the squeeze of cheap Asian imports. By 2001, every Toastmaster plant in our state was gone, shipping hundreds of jobs from rural mid-Missouri to China. The last one to go, in the town of Macon—near where I went to school— had been in operation since the 1950s. All that remained was a toxic waste cleanup site for the 5,500 people in the town it left behind. Although Toastmaster continued production in certain areas of the United States, Missouri wasn’t so fortunate.
Boonville, a town where my grandmother went to high school, was another place that lost a Toastmaster factory. In 2011, the town of about 8,000 people lost its modular home manufacturing factory to the housing crisis too. In 2012, its bread factory filed for bankruptcy. In 2013, Nordyne, which manufactured air and heating products, announced it would be moving production from Boonville to—guess where—Mexico, taking out another 250 jobs.
“From a moral standpoint, it was kicking somebody while they were already down,” the head of the local chamber of commerce said as he talked to a local newspaper.
This is not the distant past, folks. This is the reality that millions and millions of our fellow Americans in Missouri and across the country live this very day. Haldex, a brake manufacturer, packed up and left for Mexico in 2020, eliminating the last 154 jobs left at the facility in the suburbs of Kansas City. Layoffs began two weeks before Christmas. Haldex will save millions of dollars a year paying Mexican workers a fraction of what they paid back home.
I will tell you one more story, from the Bootheel in Missouri. For decades, the Noranda Aluminum smelter there was a lifeline employer for the folks in New Madrid, Marston, and surrounding communities. These were good, decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth folks. I visited with them. The smelter was the engine for their way of life, but in 2016, Noranda filed for bankruptcy and shut down. Why? Because China’s cheap, state-subsidized aluminum had flooded the market, causing global aluminum prices to plunge.
In New Madrid—a town of less than 3,000 people—about 1,000 people had gone to find new jobs, usually at much lower pay. The county government went in the red. Local police and ambulance budgets were cut. The local school district lost a $3.1 million tax payment, which forced their own layoffs and saw a 10% drop in enrollment as families left the area. People lost homes, the mayor of New Madrid said. People got divorced. An American town, filled with American families, left for dead by their own country.
What did we do to our own people?
This is not to say that Missourians don’t want fair exchange, one where they can trade and grow with the rest of the world, but the “free trade” that transpired was not free trade at all. The double-edged tragedy of the system is that not all these companies wanted to leave. Some—perhaps many—wanted desperately to stay. These people were their neighbors, their friends, their family. But over the past three decades, we punished the companies that were loyal to America while rewarding the ones that weren’t. The businesses that were eager to offshore got big bonuses at the American workers’ expense. The businesses that wanted to stay here found themselves struggling to stay alive in conditions where they couldn’t compete.
Now, some might argue that Americans don’t want to make shoes anymore, but we did a generation ago. The American workers of that age knew that there was something meaningful in creating and producing. Today, we have been taken by the idea that our social status is not what we build or create, but what we can afford to buy or consume. It is going to take generations to reverse this thinking. The post-war order has given birth to a shallow morality of materialism that measures values strictly in terms of consumption. This is a poisonous new idea, utterly alien to the traditional American way of life.
Our trade policy, like our foreign policy, failed to adapt to the new reality of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consequences were nothing short of devastating. At the dawn of the 1990s, as America looked forward to the new millennium, the architects of globalism beamed about the promise of the open society—a world without barriers or borders where all nations and cultures and economies would meld into one global economic zone.
Thirty years on, what do we have to show for it? At home, our factories and the towns that once sustained them lie in ruin, razed by the ruthless logic of the new global economy and cost efficiency. The Americans who once worked there were replaced by foreign labor overseas. The Americans who once held on were now being replaced by foreign labor here at home. Their children will graduate into a workforce where nearly 1 in 10 workers don’t even speak their own language. The twin horsemen of globalism—unprotected trade and unprotected borders—have been a catastrophe for our civilization. But, in many ways, I don’t blame the illegal immigrant who wants to come here in search of work, but we do have a country of laws, and there are consequences. I don’t blame the factory laborer in Vietnam who takes the job that once belonged to an American. Do you know who I blame? The people in power who allowed them to do it.
I blame the corporate bosses, the special interests, and, yes, the politicians who sold our country out for a seat at the table of the globalist banquet. I blame the ideologues of the status quo, the international elites, the so-called citizens of the world who see our country as a global economic zone, a giant shopping mall with an airport attached. I blame the people in cities like this one, who seem to have forgotten the men and women in towns like Boonville and New Madrid or their brothers and sisters, because “American” is not just a box you check on a tax form but a sacred responsibility that binds us to one another, an unbroken chain between our past and our future. I do not know what the future holds, but I do know what the past has meant. I know that something has to change and that President Trump is the first politician in a generation to even care enough to try.
The 77 million “deplorables” who cast their lot with Donald Trump last November were the forgotten Americans—the blue-collar patriots, the conservatives of the heart, miners, mechanics, tradesmen, and farmers; men and women who worked with their hands, grew our food, built our homes, and drilled our fuel, whose labor powered our country, whose taxes sustained our government, and whose children served and sacrificed in our wars. They stand with this president because he stood with them when no one else would.
