President Donald Trump's praise of an Apple supplier's decision to spend $10 billion for a Wisconsin campus — and his remarks that upstate New Yorkers should go where the jobs are — left some in his home state disheartened.

Foxconn Technology Group announced Wednesday at a White House event with Trump that it would build a new liquid crystal display factory in southeastern Wisconsin and create up to 13,000 jobs over time.

Wisconsin beat out New York, which had been a finalist in Foxconn's selection process and had pitched a 400-acre location outside of Utica owned by SUNY Polytechnic Institute called the Marcy Nanocenter.

Trump's praise of Wisconsin and Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou came a day after he trashed upstate New York and the state's job creation efforts, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Tuesday night.

Trump said upstate New Yorkers should pick up and move to states like Wisconsin, which have better job prospects. "You're going to need people to work in these massive plants," Trump told the Wall Street Journal. "I'm going to start explaining to people, when you have an area that just isn't working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you'll have another area 500 miles away where you can't get people, I'm going to explain, you can leave. It's OK. Don't worry about your house."

Those comments particularly irked officials in Oneida County, who hoped to land Foxconn at the Marcy Nanocenter after an Austrian computer chip maker canceled a $650 million project there back in December. Oneida County Executive Anthony J. Picente Jr. had directly pitched Foxconn earlier this year and invited company officials to tour the Utica-area site.

Picente, a Republican, said Trump's remarks were disheartening to him and others in Oneida County who have been working so hard to attract manufacturing jobs and keep their children here.

"I'm working every day to make this place better, and I would have hoped that he would have done the same," Picente remarked, noting that it's been decades since America has had a president from New York. "I'm trying to get more people here."

And like most upstate counties, Trump won Oneida County in the 2016 presidential election, receiving nearly 57 percent of the votes.

Foxconn chose a site in the Kenosha area, home to Snap-on, a tool company that Trump visited back in April. Kenosha is south of Milwaukee, just north of the Illinois border.

The Foxconn factory would initially employ 3,000 workers — about the same number that work at GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 campus in Saratoga County. The additional jobs would come with expansions of the facility, which will make LCD panels for TVs, computers and other devices.

"It's a great day for American workers and for manufacturing," Trump said. "It (the factory) will be about the biggest there is anywhere."

Blowback about Trump's remarks also came from Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office.

"We deal in facts — not fake news," Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi said. "The facts are unemployment has been cut nearly in half and private sector jobs are at an all-time high in New York. We may not be a swing state, but New York — upper and otherwise — has every industry, every culture, and everything else to offer."

The state has vowed to find a high-tech tenant for the Utica site, which has enough space for three computer chip factories and sits next to SUNY Poly's Utica campus and its Quad-C lab that will soon be doing computer chip packaging for silicon carbide chips for power electronics that are being made at SUNY Poly's Albany campus.

The Foxconn jobs are not as lucrative as those at Fab 8 or the types of computer chip factories that the state is trying to bring to Utica. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said the Foxconn jobs would average salaries of $53,000, about half of what the average salary is at Fab 8.

The $10 billion investment by Foxconn will also be offset by $3 billion in government incentives, according to Walker, who called the Foxconn deal one of the largest economic development projects.

"This is likely No. 1," Walker said.

Walker said Foxconn would be building out 20 million square feet of space, an amount that would rival even Intel's large computer chip manufacturing campuses in Oregon and Arizona. However, at least one press report said that would include space for housing, stores and service businesses that would accompany the factory.

Trump also told the Wall Street Journal that Apple is planning "three big plants—big, big, big" in the U.S., a shocking statement since Apple generally outsources all of its manufacturing, including its microchips.

It is unclear if New York state, which has several other potential sites available in addition to Utica, would compete for any of the Apple projects as well.

Apple recently announced a $1 billion fund to invest in U.S. manufacturers, although there was not the expectation that Apple would build its own factories.

lrulison@timesunion.com • 518-454-5504 • @larryrulison