Mr. Trump has blamed China and other countries for job losses in the United States.

“The field has not been a level field. Jobs have been leaving our country, going to China and Mexico and lots of other places, and you’ll be seeing what’s happening over the next few weeks. It should be very interesting for you to watch.”

This needs context. Like Mr. Trump’s criticism of currency manipulation, this talking point about China’s impact on jobs is outdated. While Mr. Trump does broaden his claim to “other countries,” he also ignores a huge driver in the shift in the labor market: automation in the United States.

Independent studies have found that Chinese imports have cost the United States jobs; one analysis pinned the number to at least two million from 1999 to 2011. But rising wages and costs mean that China is currently facing more competition from other Asian countries and may be losing jobs to them.

Productivity gains have also displaced jobs and according to other research are a much bigger factor than trade with China. A study from Ball State University found that out of about 5.6 million manufacturing jobs lost from 2000 to 2010, 13.4 percent of those losses were due to trade and 87.8 percent because of technological advances.

Mr. Trump blamed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization for the U.S. manufacturing decline.

“Since China joined, that’s another beauty, the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States has lost many more than 60,000 factories.”

True, but … Mr. Trump has repeated this statistic at rallies before and after his election. While his figure is accurate, there’s debate around the implied causal link.

Census Bureau data does show that the number of manufacturing establishments decreased by more than 70,000 from 2001 to 2014. But economists disagree on how much of this is because of China’s entry, with some pointing again to automation as a driver.

The manufacturing decline in the United States is also in line with changes in Western Europe and Japan, the Congressional Research Service pointed out in a January report. The report also notes that the United States “appears to have outperformed many other wealthy countries in the growth of manufacturing value added in recent years.”

Mr. Trump has characterized importing into the Chinese market as ‘impossible.’

“So we take in things free, and yet, if you want to take a plant or you want to do something, you want to sell something into China and other countries, it’s very, very hard. In some cases, it’s impossible. They won’t even take your product.”

This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump spoke of import taxes China levied on the United States in a March 2016 interview with The Times, but overstated the scope of these duties.