President Donald Trump is a roadside magician whose best trick is convincing the public that he actually has tricks. But all of Trump’s “magic” since taking office has been an obvious sleight of little hands.
Oh, special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating my ties to Russia—time to start a Twitter war with North Korea.
What’s sad is the hordes of people who actually believe he’s special. They actually believe that he can make Mexican people disappear behind a wall. They actually believe that newspapers—institutions of recorded history—are “fake news” because he says so. They actually believe that he didn’t collude with Russia despite the Russian Oreo-cookie-crumb trail leading to the White House.
The people who want so desperately to believe that the president is pulling coins from the air behind their ears are running out of excuses to explain how this president, who really hasn’t progressed beyond third-grade-level-liar status, isn’t just a hack disguised in orange makeup and white-man weave.
Remember that whole “Make America great again” bullshit that was tied into bringing jobs back to America and blah, blah, blah? It turns out that whole spiel of stopping foreigners from stealing American work didn’t even apply to Trump’s own resorts.
A study by Vox found that out of 144 jobs available at three of the president’s properties, only one was filled by an American, and the other 143 jobs were given to foreign guest workers using H-2B visas.
Vox explains how Trump businesses had to find workers outside the country because Americans weren’t skilled:
The H-2B visa program allows seasonal, non-agricultural employers — like hotels and ski resorts — to hire foreign workers when they can’t find American ones. The Trump administration temporarily expanded this guest-worker program in 2017 while restricting other avenues of legal immigration, including the H-1B program for high-skilled workers.
The Trump Organization is exactly the kind of company that relies on the H-2B visa program for low-skilled workers.
Vox reviewed recruiting files submitted to the US Department of Labor for two Trump properties in Florida (including Mar-a-Lago) and one in New York from the start of 2016 through the end of 2017. In that period, hiring managers said they were able to find and hire only one qualified American worker — a cook — for 144 open positions for servers, cooks, housekeepers, and bartenders.
According to Vox, all of the businesses owned by Trump appeared to suffer from the same issue: They’d post a job listing and then no one applied or was skilled enough to do the work.
The hiring manager at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., noted that only seven U.S. workers applied for jobs. Mar-a-Lago jobs allowed workers to make anywhere from $10.33 per hour for housekeepers to $13.43 for cooks and $11.88 for servers (no tips).
Apparently, no Americans wanted to work at Trump’s Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., property, as Vox reports that no one applied for any of the available positions.
The New York Daily News notes that after the Trump administration got the cap raised on H-2B visas, “three days later Trump properties put in a request to bring on 76 guest workers.”
There is no magic here.