President Donald Trump made many promises en route to the White House, but none more consistently than this: he vowed to get the American Rust Belt working again. So when the Taiwanese electronics supplier Foxconn pledged to invest $10bn to build an LCD production plant in the industrial heartland of Wisconsin, in an area that crucially tipped last year’s election in his favour, the president called a White House press conference to boast about it.

But Wisconsinites are now counting the cost of the deal: Foxconn has promised to create an initial 3,000 jobs rising to as many at 13,000, but Wisconsin had to offer between $200,000 and $1.5m in state aid for each new payslip. So now residents of the area where the plant is meant to be built — on 1,000 acres of gently rolling farmland beside an interstate highway near Milwaukee — are asking whether Mr Trump put politics before economics in helping them strike this bargain. 

“It’s a bad deal,” said Jeff Andre, a sheriff’s department volunteer at the Kenosha county fair last week. Either Kenosha or Racine county, both areas with a proud history of manufacturing in the last century, will host the plant. “Are they actually going to hire that many?” Mr Andre asks, echoing concerns expressed by many Wisconsinites that Foxconn may opt for more robots and fewer humans, and still be able to collect $1.35bn in capital expenditure credits.