What We Know About Claim Some PA Trump Voters Won’t Get Christmas Bonus Due to Tariffs
A story shared on social media accurately reported that Pennsylvania workers who voted for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump would not receive Christmas bonuses in 2024 due to his proposed tariffs.
In the days following U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 November presidential election, a story spread widely on multiple platforms, receiving tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes collectively. The story was as follows:
My husband works for a small manufacturing company and here in southwestern PA that means most employees are Trump voters. When the president of the company sat them down today to tell them their annual Christmas bonus would not come this year because they now need to purchase at least a years worth of products prior to January 21st due to the proposed tariffs, they did not understand. My husband said that their president had to explain what a tariff is and how it will directly hurt their company. They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff. This is the level of ignorance voting against their own interests here in PA, where we failed American women and children last night.
Despite the viral nature of the claim, there was no evidence to back it up. The “small manufacturing company” was unnamed, and the original poster was not identified. The story was almost exclusively shared as a screenshot, with the original poster’s username cut off, tell-tale signs of misinformation spreading in the form of copypasta — copied-and-pasted text shared online.
While one post on Reddit claimed that it appeared on social media platform Bluesky, another post on Substack said that it originated “in response YouTube video about the election results.”
And so it begins (as seen on Bluesky)
byu/RemarkableAd3371 inLeopardsAteMyFace
(substack.com)
We were unable to find the original post or comment on either Bluesky or YouTube. Using Google’s reverse-image search, we scanned dozens of results, finding no original post. As of this writing, without any evidence to back the claims made in the story, we have rated this claim as unfounded. If we find evidence to support the claims, we will update this story.
