May 2, 2016 4 min read

In an appearance in Pittsburgh before the April 26 primary election, Donald Trump promised he would bring back the late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.

He also promised he would bring steel and coal back to Pittsburgh.

Bringing back Joe Paterno would probably be the easier of the two tasks.

Seemingly expert at telling a crowd what it wants to hear – an art that one might less diplomatically call “pandering” – Trump has promised a wall along the Mexican border to those who fear America’s changing demographics, steep tariffs on Chinese goods that would likely wreak severe havoc on the U.S. economy and the replacement of the Affordable Care Act with “something terrific,” despite the fact that the alternatives he has advanced so far have all the substance of something mapped out on a napkin after dinner.

And now he says he’s going to turn back the clock and bring coal and steel back to Pittsburgh and, one assumes, the larger region. This whole notion, according to the Politico website, came to life through a Trump aide who gives the GOP frontrunner “a little chart on how the community’s doing … I have a guy who does this stuff. I don’t know how he gets it – all the top stuff.”

It’s hard to tell how much of Pittsburgh Trump actually saw from the tinted windows of his limousine during his brief stopover, but if he looked carefully, he might have noticed that Pittsburgh is not a post-industrial ghost town on a par with Flint, Mich. The city’s once-smoky skies have been cleaned up, and its economy has fared better than many other cities. Officials in formerly mighty Rust Belt leviathans like Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y., would be ecstatic if their cities were as vibrant as Pittsburgh is now. With the city’s economy now resting on a foundation of medicine, education and technology, Pittsburgh has moved on from steel.

Even if steel somehow migrated back to the United States from the spots around the globe it fled to in the 1970s and 1980s, who’s to say it would come to Pittsburgh? There’s every likelihood it would go to the South or some other region. Making it all the more implausible that the mills that once hummed in Homestead are going to be revived is the fact that steel isn’t doing all that well in the places it has relocated to. In China, production dropped by 2.3 percent in 2015, thanks to the country’s contracting economy, and it is bleeding an estimated $10 billion per year. Manufacturing jobs are disappearing in other parts of the world on the strength of productivity increases.

And, of course, coal has been in freefall in recent years, due to the turn to renewable energy and the growth of the natural gas industry, with its cheaper fuel that burns more cleanly. Presumably, in a Trump administration, our allies would reap the economic benefits of the growing renewables sector while we haplessly try to build a time machine that will return us to 1956.

There are valid reasons to mourn the decline of manufacturing in the United States, particularly among those who are old enough to have lived through its heyday. Young men could graduate from high school one day, go get their union card the next, and be on their way to a secure middle-class life. Not anymore.

Those once-abundant manufacturing jobs have mostly been replaced by lower-paying work at retail and fast-food outlets. There is a real need for policies that will reduce income inequality, increase the skills of American workers and move more of them into higher-paying jobs, but making facile promises to resurrect dying or diminished industries is not the answer.