It has been more than a year since Donald Trump, then the president-elect, went to that Carrier air conditioning plant in Indianapolis and bragged about a deal to keep its jobs from going to Mexico. Yet in May, when nobody was looking, the company said 632 jobs would be replaced by robots and automation—the last of those positions would go bye-bye no later than Dec. 22. As Trump likes to say: Merry Christmas.

“Trump came in there to the factory last December and blew smoke up our asses,” one of those workers, Brenda Darlene Battle, told the Washington Examiner. ”He wasn’t gonna save those jobs.”

Speaking of jobs, Indiana’s unemployment rate has jumped to 3.9%—a sharp rise from 3.0% in June. Is it because more people are entering the labor force, which can help drive up the jobless rate? Quite the opposite. The state’s labor force declined by about 1,600 people, and more than 25,000 people have become unemployed.

Similar statistics abound throughout the Rust Belt states, all of which turned red for Trump last year. Unemployment rates in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio have risen in recent months, while the labor force has shrunk. Usually unemployment rates rise when people enter the labor market (and are thus counted in monthly data), but that’s not the case now—a sign that things aren’t turning around like Trump says.

But if you think I’m blaming the president for this, you’re wrong. The fact is the problems that plague the Rust Belt are so intertwined, so deeply entrenched, that no one could reasonably be expected to come in, wave a magic wand and make things better. Where Trump did screw up, though, was giving suckers, I mean voters, in those states the impression that he could do just that. He said fixing things would be easy, and that we’d get tired of all the winning. You know the phrase “under-promise but over-deliver?” When it comes to the Rust Belt, Trump so far has done the opposite. But even a more modest leader, a non-braggart, wouldn’t have made much a difference after a year either.

Also see:Trump Scoreboard shows 1.7 million new jobs created during presidency

There are plenty of things that are dragging the Rust Belt down. Some are decades old: The region remains tethered to, and overdependent on, the industries of yesteryear. That generally means jobs that involve mineral extraction, assembly lines, and old-school manufacturing. Younger workers are leaving for 21st-century jobs elsewhere; the remaining workforce therefore skews older. Some problems have only popped up in recent years, like the devastating opioid crisis that has claimed thousands of mostly younger lives.

The growing disparity between so-called red and blue states.

These things—tied together in a nasty knot that can’t be undone easily—reflect the overall problem, namely the growing divide between America’s rural and urban areas, says Jonathan Fortun, a senior research analyst at the Institute for International Finance in Washington. Rural areas he says, are in one big “vicious destructive downward cycle. Let’s say you’re a young STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) graduate from one of these rural areas. If the only jobs around are assembly line or coal mining jobs, you’re going to leave. That probably means going to an urban area, probably on the East or West Coasts, or some place like Austin.”

And when that happens, he adds, it’s more than just one young man or woman leaving. It’s a future taxpayer, future homeowner, a future business owner leaving. It shrinks the tax base of the town he or she is fleeing, making it all the more difficult for that town to invest in the future and grow.

Fortun calls this a “push-pull” dynamic: The bleak reality of an old-steel mill town, for example, versus the allure of something brighter, better paying, with more upward mobility elsewhere. That’s why while rust belt states are in this “destructive downward cycle,” other areas are in a “virtuous upward cycle,” constantly nourished by the presence of great research universities like Stanford and MIT, proximity to venture capital—and a constant influx of young brains from elsewhere. The rich get richer, the poor —well, you know.

It shouldn’t be surprising then, that the IIF has determined that the employment-to-population ratio in the Rust Belt (in fact red states in general)—a key indicator of a region’s economic health—lags that of blue states by several percentage points. The IIF calls this the “discouraged worker” effect. The latest batch of state data from the Trump administration’s own Labor Department bears witness to this.

If Trump wants to make these depressed areas great again, it’ll take more than some highly publicized strong-arming of a company or two. We’ve seen that this doesn’t work. He says his tax reform bill, which he’s likely to sign before Christmas, will help. Let’s just hope it’s not just more of the usual Trump over-promising but under-deliviering.