Mission Accomplished: Trump Likes Apple’s Plan, Especially the Part About Mexico That I Don’t Think Was Real

Mike Allen, writing for Axios, under the headline “Trump Manufacturing Win: Apple to Spend $500 Billion in U.S., Hire 20,000”:

Trump met with Cook on Thursday in the Oval Office. Then Trump got so excited that he revealed the plans prematurely, saying on-camera while meeting with governors that Cook is “investing hundreds of billions of dollars. I hope he’s announced it — I hope I didn’t announce it, but what the hell? All I do is tell the truth — that’s what he told me. Now he has to do it, right?”

“He is investing hundreds of billions of dollars and others, too,” Trump continued. “We will have a lot of chipmakers coming in, a lot of automakers coming in. They stopped two plants in Mexico that were ... starting construction. They just stopped them — they’re going to build them here instead, because they don’t want to pay the tariffs. Tariffs are amazing.”

Apple and Tim Cook, I’m sure, are pleased as pie to have today’s announcement portrayed this way, as a “Trump manufacturing win”, despite the fact that it’s seemingly exactly in line with the trajectory Apple’s been on for US job creation since 2018, including a nearly identical announcement in 2021 (that they largely, but not entirely, followed through on).

The Mexico angle rings weird to my ears, though. Bloomberg picked up on that too, running a headline over the weekend that read “Trump Says Cook Shifting Apple Manufacturing From Mexico to US”.

The last thing I remember Apple having assembled in Mexico were a small number of late model Apple Extended Keyboard II’s in 1995 (which were inferior to their American-made models, like the one I’m using to write this). It’s quite possible I’m overlooking some Mexican-made Apple products in the intervening decades, but if there are any, they’re not recent. So I suspect Tim Cook, in his meeting with Trump last week, sold him a bill of goods, and more or less convinced Trump that Apple had been planning to commission some new plants in Mexico (a country so loathsome Trump confiscated their gulf) but, thanks to President Trump’s inspiring leadership, Apple would instead be building those plants right here in the US, in the big old red state of Texas — when in fact all of this is pretty much exactly what Apple had been planning to do all along.

★ Monday, 24 February 2025