Trump said his policies were creating jobs in Ohio. But nearly 1,400 workers lost theirs at the former Navistar plant days before his rally

Nearly 1,400 people lost their jobs Wednesday at what had been the Navistar truck factory in southwestern Ohio, three days before President Donald Trump held a rally at a nearby high school. According to AP News, the cuts were large enough to wipe out about a year of job growth in the greater Dayton area. Trump did not mention the layoffs, grocery prices, or gas prices at the Saturday night event in Vandalia.

Kyle Bos, 30, was among the workers let go. Sitting with co-workers and sipping tea from beer mugs, he said five grocery items now cost what a full cart once did. He has two daughters, with a third due in January. A United Auto Workers member who calls himself a centrist, Bos said he plans to spend the weeks before the November election knocking on doors for Democrats.

Asked how many times he had voted for Trump, Bos held up three tattooed fingers and said he is finished with the president. “Something has to change politically in this country,” he said. “Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.” Trump has promised $5,000 checks if Republicans keep the House and Senate next month. Bos called that offer offensive. “It feels like a bribe, a slap in the face, and, like, that we’re all ignorant,” he said.

Plant sale and thin overtime leave factory pay little changed

The White House said Trump’s tax cuts and trade deals have helped Ohio. Workers at the Springfield plant described a different result. Broad tariffs did not raise demand, and the former owner, International Motors, decided to unload the site. 

Trump’s main law, the One Big Beautiful Bill, temporarily ended taxes on tips and overtime, but forklift driver Marianne Donnelly said that break did little for her check. “We weren’t getting a lot of overtime because of the economy,” she said. “There just wasn’t any to be had, very little to be had.”

Donnelly said she buys discounted beef, pork, and chicken and freezes them. She dropped The Columbus Dispatch, The Washington Post, and some streaming services. Laid-off employees, including Donnelly, said they expect Roshel, a Canadian armored-vehicle maker buying the plant, to bring them back in six to 12 months. Roshel said it is “working with everyone involved not only to protect the current workforce, but to more than double it over the coming years through a phased process.”

At the Vandalia rally, part of what Trump calls a 32-day stretch of events, he argued the public is being sold a weaker economy than the one he sees. “The fake news media, they refuse to talk about our record-setting numbers. So tonight, if you don’t mind, I’m going to do it myself,” he said. He pointed to an $850 million investment by aircraft maker Electra, a new Stellantis project in Ohio, and Bayer’s Friday announcement of a $2.2 billion drug plant near Columbus as evidence his policies were creating jobs.

Dayton, a city of 137,000, once led the nation in patents per capita. The Wright brothers’ airplane, the cash register, the stepladder, and the electric car starter were invented there. Federal data show the area has lost about half of its 90,000 factory jobs since 1990, after the North American Free Trade Agreement shifted work to Mexico and after China entered the World Trade Organization.

Phil Plummer, Montgomery County sheriff at the time and a Republican state representative since 2019, said the fallout sent him into politics. “My jail was 40% drug addicts, 50% mental health patients, 10% criminals,” he said. “We got it upside down, that’s what drove me to the state house.”

Plummer, now Montgomery County Republican chairman and a candidate for the Ohio state Senate, said Trump is what keeps the party’s business and working-class voters together. Economic promises in Ohio have often been tied to political ones, as Trump promised $5000 checks if Republicans keep Congress, a claim Bessent backs but won’t say how the country would pay for.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has since grown to 38,000 direct jobs and drawn firms such as Joby Aviation, the Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Electra. Jeff Hoagland, chief executive of the Dayton Development Coalition, said both parties backed that base-driven recovery. “In economic development, it takes time, and you have got to give it a little bit of time to bake, and then once it does, then you’re going to have something special,” he said.

Local candidates still framed the election around prices. Just 17% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the cost of living, and former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is trying to turn that frustration into a comeback against the Republican Sen. Jon Husted two years after Brown lost the seat. 

At a Monday fundraiser in the renovated Dayton Arcade, former teacher Rose Lounsbury, running again as a Democrat for state representative, said, “There is a gap between what people want and what they feel is available.” She added, “People don’t want to live a life of subsistence. They want to live the middle-class dream and they feel it’s not available like it once was.”

Her opponent, State Rep. Andrea White, spent the week in Columbus pushing a temporary halt to the state’s 38.5-cent-per-gallon gas tax. She said flattening the income tax and limiting property-tax increases puts money back with taxpayers. “The concept is, put it back in the hands of the people who pay the taxes, so they have more of their own money,” White said. 

On the Monday before the layoffs, UAW members Morgan Hughes and JoJo Burkhard canvassed Kettering, a suburb named for the inventor of the electric car starter. Hughes, 35, said the Navistar job let her buy a house at 21 and work beside her father.

After her hours were cut, she drove for DoorDash and earned a real estate license. A wrist tattoo shows a cross and the words “Be Still And Know,” from Psalm 46:10. Burkhard said the economy made the pitch easier. “It isn’t a hard pitch at all,” she said. “And even if they don’t want to stay Democratic long-term, they’ll at least give the candidates a chance this election, which could be a turning point for us.”

After the doors, the two stopped for potstickers. Burkhard opened a fortune cookie as the week caught up with her: no work for her, her boyfriend, or her mother. The slip read, “You’ll find your inner strength to overcome challenges.”