President Donald Trump keeps talking about how his policies will supposedly bring manufacturing jobs to the United States. But Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, keeps accidentally admitting those jobs are going to be done by robots. Hard-working, patriotic robots.
Lutnick was asked about his previous comments on CNBC Tuesday during an interview where the secretary tried to downplay the harm Trump’s tariffs are already causing. The commerce secretary tried to push back against people who were upset that he kept saying the jobs coming to the U.S. would be for robots.
CNBC host Brian Sullivan pointed out that Lutnick was “taking a lot of guff” about his “robot comments.”
“Will the robots take the jobs? I mean, it’s a serious question,” Sullivan said. Lutnick said that the factory being built behind them by TSMC would have plenty of jobs for workers.
“We’re going to go look through this plant, and what you’re going to see is a highly automated plant that employs 3,000 people per plant. Right?” Lutnick said. “You’ve got to remember these plants, all these automated arms and stuff, they need to be fixed. They all need a technician to fix them. They need the air conditioning system to fix them. Right? All of these things. This is tradecraft.”
Lutnick went on to say that the jobs in these factories would pay between $70,000 and $90,000 and “go up to $150,000 and $200,000” per year. “This is the future of American manufacturing. It is not as the joke online, you know, like Americans work on the sewing machine. Oh, come on,” Lutnick insisted.
The joke Lutnick was referring to is the AI-generated videos that recently went viral, showing Americans making clothes.
“We are going to drive the high-value, high-performance jobs to America,” Lutnick insisted. “And of course, the rest of the world is going to make the low-value things and sell it to us inexpensively. Of course, that’s the model. People just don’t want to listen to the truth. no matter how many times we say.”
The commerce secretary said that President Trump’s tariffs would drive factories back to the U.S. and people would be trained “not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future.”
And then Lutnick seemed to suggest that generation upon generation of people would work in these factories, the kind of idea that seemed antithetical to what’s commonly called the American Dream.
Lutnick: “It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. We let the auto plants go overseas.”
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 29, 2025 at 10:51 AM
Typically, the American Dream involved parents working hard so that their children could have some social mobility, achieving greater wealth than the previous generation. But Lutnick’s idea of a permanent underclass is pretty common among the ruling class, even if it’s rarely articulated so bluntly.
Lutnick first got a lot of flack back in February after repeatedly saying that jobs would be coming back to the U.S. but characterizing it as something that would only allow American workers to either “screw little screws” or complete menial tasks. Lutnick also suggested robots would be doing most of the work.
“Think about it, we all hold our iPhones, which we love. Why do they have to be made in Taiwan and China? Why can’t those be made with robotics in America?” Lutnick told CNBC earlier this month. “And you know what President Trump has said? They’re going to be made in America.”
Lutnick also claimed on Tuesday that Apple CEO Tim Cook wanted to bring jobs to the U.S., again emphasizing the role of automation while getting defensive about past comments.
“So I talked to Tim Cook the other day. I said, when are you going to bring the iPhone? Right?” Lutnick said. “When are you going to bring the iPhone? He said, I need to have the robotic arms, right? Do it at a scale and a precision that I could bring it here. And the day I see that available, it’s coming here because I don’t like to employ all these people foreign, that’s my biggest risk. What if in China there was a strike?”
Lutnick went on to claim that Cook really “wants to build it here. He’s going to build it here,” but didn’t provide a timeline.
“Americans are going to be the technicians who drive those factories. They’re not going to be the ones screwing it in. People just take my statements out of context,” Lutnick said.
The Dow rose 300 points after Lutnick appeared on CNBC Tuesday, where he also claimed that a trade deal had been achieved and just needed to be announced. The rumors, as suggested on Fox Business, were that it was a deal with India, but it’s not clear whether that was true.
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