Springfield plant lays off nearly 1,400 workers ahead of Trump’s local midterm rally

Nearly 1,400 workers at the former Navistar truck factory in Springfield, Ohio, lost their jobs on Wednesday. The cuts landed three days before President Donald Trump’s rally at a nearby high school in the greater Dayton area.

The layoffs are large enough to wipe out an entire year of job growth around Dayton, a city of 137,000 that has already shed about half of its 90,000 factory jobs since 1990. Families now face climbing grocery bills, canceled subscriptions, and side gigs while a Canadian armored-vehicle maker prepares to take over the site.

New York Post reporting detailed how International Motors, the plant’s former owner, chose to offload the facility. Laid-off workers say they expect Roshel to rehire many of them in six to 12 months, echoing disputes over federal job cuts. Roshel itself stated it is “working with everyone involved not only to protect the current workforce, but to more than double it over the coming years through a phased process.”

Kyle Bos, 30, a United Auto Workers member with two daughters and a third due in January, is among those cut. He identifies as a centrist and once backed Trump three times. Now he plans to spend the final weeks before the November election canvassing for Democrats.

Bos listed the daily hits: five grocery items now cost what a full cart once did. He called the promised $5,000 checks, if Republicans hold the House and Senate, as Democrats try to keep impeachment alive, something that “feels like a bribe, a slap in the face, and, like, that we’re all ignorant.”

He put the larger frustration plainly.

“Something has to change politically in this country. Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.”

AP News captured the same worker accounts of soaring costs and the sudden halt to overtime that had helped carry households.

Marianne Donnelly drove a forklift at the plant. She now buys marked-down beef, pork, and chicken for the freezer and has canceled The Columbus Dispatch, The Washington Post, and streaming services. “We weren’t getting a lot of overtime because of the economy. There just wasn’t any to be had, very little to be had,” she said.

Morgan Hughes, 35, bought a house at 21 with her Navistar wages and worked alongside her father. When hours first dropped she drove for DoorDash and earned a real estate license. This week she and JoJo Burkhard knocked on doors in Kettering, the Dayton suburb named for the inventor of the electric car starter, trying to turn union members and retirees toward Democrats as courts block administration removals.

Burkhard said inflation and the economy have made the conversations easier. After a morning of canvassing the pair settled at a Chinese restaurant. She cracked a fortune cookie that read, “You’ll find your inner strength to overcome challenges,” and tears welled up. The layoffs hit her, her boyfriend, and her mother all at once.

“It isn’t a hard pitch at all. And even if they don’t want to stay Democratic long-term, they’ll at least give the candidates a chance this election, which could be a turning point for us,” Burkhard said.

The political stakes sit in plain view. Republican Sen. Jon Husted faces a challenge from former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who lost his seat two years ago and now tries to harness the disenchantment. The Ohio race could help decide Senate control while redistricting reshapes the map elsewhere. Local races add pressure too. Rose Lounsbury, a former schoolteacher running again as a Democrat for state representative, held a Monday fundraiser with acoustic guitar and flute at the renovated Dayton Arcade.

Lounsbury described the mood she hears: “There is a gap between what people want and what they feel is available. People don’t want to live a life of subsistence. They want to live the middle-class dream and they feel it’s not available like it once was.”

Her Republican opponent, State Rep. Andrea White, spent the past week in Columbus helping lead a push for a temporary suspension of the 38.5-cents-per-gallon state gas tax. “The concept is, put it back in the hands of the people who pay the taxes, so they have more of their own money,” White said. She pointed to the Republican-led state government’s work flattening the income tax and reining in property-tax hikes as cushions against inflation.

Phil Plummer, a former Montgomery County sheriff who has served as a Republican state representative since 2019 and now seeks a state Senate seat, entered politics after the 2008 financial crisis. He remains Montgomery County Republican chairman and stresses that Trump holds the coalition of businesses and working-class families together.

Plummer recalled the jail he once ran: “My jail was 40% drug addicts, 50% mental health patients, 10% criminals. We got it upside down, that’s what drove me to the state house.”

Dayton’s longer arc shows both loss and rebound. Federal data track the factory-job hemorrhage that accelerated after NAFTA shifted work to Mexico and after China joined the World Trade Organization. Yet Wright-Patterson Air Force Base now directly employs 38,000 people. Its innovations have drawn aerospace firms including Joby Aviation, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Electra.

Jeff Hoagland, CEO of the Dayton Development Coalition, said Republicans and Democrats alike recognized the base’s value over the past two decades. “In economic development, it takes time, and you have got to give it a little bit of time to bake, and then once it does, then you’re going to have something special.”

On Thursday, one day after the Springfield cuts, Trump spoke at a truck plant in Texas. He framed a different national picture.

“All over the country, they’re building factories, plants, manufacturing’s coming back. The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations.”

The White House pointed to Electra’s $850 million investment plus announcements from Honda, Stellantis, and others as proof that tax cuts and trade deals are delivering jobs in Ohio. Trump’s major legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill, temporarily stripped taxes from tips and overtime. His Saturday stop is part of what he calls a 32-day marathon of rallies.

Americans’ views on living costs remain a live pressure point, with just 17% approving of the handling of that issue. Democrats see an opening among union households that once backed Trump’s blunt talk. Yet the same households still confront the decades-long hollowing of factory floors that no single plant sale can reverse overnight.

Roshel’s phased plan to more than double the workforce offers one concrete path forward for the Springfield site. State tax relief puts cash back in paychecks now. Nationwide plant announcements continue. The workers walking the lines and the doors in Kettering will decide how much weight each of those facts carries at the ballot box next month.

Working families in Ohio have lived the cost of offshoring and the grind of inflation. Lasting recovery will be measured by plants that stay open and grow, not by the next temporary check or the loudest canvass route.