Trump says he'll force Apple to manufacture in the U.S.

This isn't the first time Trump has targeted Silicon Valley, first going after them on immigration

Donald Trump says a lot of things that are nonsense, and that's being nice about it. He's going to get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Yup. Ok. Sure. His favorite book is The Bible. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, please. Stop it. You're killing me!

He makes grand, bold statements that he has to know will never come true, or are just outright lies. The only people who don't seem to know he's lying are his supporters. 

Here's his latest proposal, from his speech at Liberty University on Monday: Donald Trump is going to get Apple to start making its devices in the United States.

“We are going to do what’s good for the country,” Trump said. “We’re going to get Apple to build its damn computers in this country instead of other countries.”

Unlike some of his other prognostications, though, Trump actually has a plan for this one: he is going to tax American companies that manufacture their goods outside of the U.S. Using Ford as an example, he said that the company would bring its plant back to this country rather than paying that additional tax.

The most ridiculous part of that proposal, as Gizmodo pointed out, is that it goes against what Trump, and the entire Republican Party, say they stand for: a free and open market. 

“Free trade is good. But we have to do it. Or we won’t have a country left," said Trump.

The other problem is that such a move would almost certainly raise the cost of Apple products, and not just because it would have to pay workers more. As a report from the New York Times back in 2012 pointed out, Apple needed 8,700 industrial engineers to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones.

The company’s analysts had forecast that it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days.

Sad to say, but it seems like the U.S. just doesn't have the capabilities anymore. How that happened is probably a discussion for another day.

Trump vs. Silicon Valley

Saying he would force Apple to bring back jobs is a good line. It probably works for Trump to go after the tech industry, something he has done before in this campaign, calling out Silicon Valley, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular, over its immigration policy.

Specifically he wants companies to hire American STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates, rather than immigrants who come to the United States on H-1B visas.

"This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities," said Trump.

The tech world has also hit Trump back. Mark Zuckerberg essentially declared himself to be the anti-Trump after he proposed a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States, something that even Dick Cheney found to be morally repugnant.

Those same comments raised the ire of Anonymous, which took the opportunity to knock Trump Tower offline. 

Silicon Valley typically votes Democrat. In the 2012 election, a total of 3,299 Silicon Valley employees donated $2,462,038 to Barack Obama, while only 528 Silicon Valley employees gave Mitt Romney a total of $357,438.

So chances are that not many tech leaders were going to support the Republican candidate, whoever it turns out to be. But with Trump taking explicit shots at tech companies, the chances of him winning over their support now seems to be slim to none. 

(Image source: nbcnews.com)