Former president Donald Trump has vowed to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs overseas—but that hasn’t prevented his social media company, Truth Social, from outsourcing work to Mexican employees.
Truth Social has hired two Mexican programmers through a third-party firm, according to ProPublica. That fact has reportedly roiled the tiny, Florida-based company, which touts on its homepage that it is “Proudly made in the United States of America. 🇺🇸” In a recent letter to the board of Trump Media and Technology Group, which oversees Truth Social, employees complained that CEO and former Republican congressman Devin Nunes has repeatedly hired foreign contractors over American workers: “This approach not only contradicts the America First principles we stand for but also raises concerns about the quality, dedication, and alignment of our workforce with our core values,” reads the complaint, which was also first reported by ProPublica.
Those “America First” principles are core to Trump’s economic platform … if not his actual business practices. In late September, Trump threatened the agricultural manufacturer John Deere with “a 200 percent tariff on everything you want to sell into the United States” if it went ahead with plans to outsource some production to Mexico. He’s issued similar warnings to US and foreign automakers.
However, the policy appears more flexible for Trump’s businesses, Truth Social among them. On LinkedIn, six people who claim to work at Trump Media list their location as North Macedonia, a small country in the Balkans. Trump Media also hired one of its top executives from North Macedonia last year, relying on a GOP congressman to help fast-track his foreign worker visa. The former president has, in fact, leaned on foreign investors and patrons for decades: Russian backers reportedly swooped in to save Trump Hotels when the brand faced collapse in the early 2000s, and Trump has done millions of dollars of business with the governments of China, Saudi Arabia, India, Qatar, and Kuwait—some of it while in office.
Spokespeople for Trump’s various business interests have long and vocally denied that any of this represents a conflict of interest with Trump’s previous presidential duties or a contradiction to the “America First” project. In a statement to ProPublica, a Trump Media representative sought to downplay the company’s foreign hiring practices: “Presenting the fact that [Trump Media] works with precisely two specialist contractors in Mexico as some sort of sensational scandal is just the latest in a long line of defamatory conspiracy theories,” the statement said. Trump Media employed only 36 full-time workers as of its last annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
