U.S. President Donald Trump met Tuesday with executives from the Big 3 American automakers, urging them to expand their manufacturing in the United States rather than overseas.
“I want new plants to be built here for cars sold here!” Trump said on his Twitter account.
The meeting with the leaders of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler marked the second day in a row the new president has called top corporate leaders to the White House to push for creation of more U.S. manufacturing jobs. In the weeks leading up to his inauguration as the country’s 45th president last Friday, Trump criticized U.S. automakers for expanding their operations in Mexico and praised them when they announced plans to add jobs in the U.S.
WATCH: Trump’s White House meeting with auto execs
Trump has warned the business executives he will try to get Congress to approve a “substantial border tax,” perhaps 35 percent, on companies that move manufacturing out of the country and then bring their products back to the U.S. to sell to American consumers. The new president has promised to “massively” cut government regulations and taxes as a lure to keep American companies in the U.S.
Manufacturing plays an important role in the country’s economy, the world’s largest, but the sector has lost five million jobs since 2000 because of automation and manufacturers moving jobs to other countries in search of cheaper labor. Auto workers in Mexico are paid about a fifth of their U.S. counterparts or even less.
More than 12.3 million U.S. workers currently work in manufacturing, a sizeable number, yet fewer than one in 10 U.S. workers are now employed in factories, compared to a quarter of the labor force in 1960.
But Trump has emphasized the sector in his first days in office after winning the presidency largely because blue collar workers in the country’s heartland voted for him in key states that determined the outcome of the election. Many of these workers have become disenchanted with the overall recovery from the country’s steep recession in 2008 and 2009, left behind by the globalization of the world economy, still unemployed or working at jobs that pay less than they once earned.
On Monday, Trump asked the leaders of Dow Chemical, SpaceX, the Dell computing firm, the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company, aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and others to come up with a list in the next 30 days of ways to boost U.S. manufacturing.
Later, the Republican president withdrew the U.S. from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, while continuing to make a false claim about the November election.
Voters cast ballots as early absentee voting began ahead of the U.S. presidential election in Medina, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. Oct. 12, 2016.
Unsubstantiated election fraud allegations
Trump insisted at a meeting with congressional leaders that he lost the national popular vote by nearly three million votes to Democrat Hillary Clinton because three million to five million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. cast fraudulent votes for her. Trump defeated her in the Electoral College, the U.S. system of selecting its presidents in which the state-by-state election results determine the winner, not the national vote totals.
There was little evidence of any voter fraud during the election, and certainly not on the scale Trump cited.
Trump has made similar claims before, warning throughout the campaign that the process would be rigged against him. A few weeks after being elected, he wrote on Twitter, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions who voted illegally.”
FILE – Demonstrators rally for fair trade at the Capitol in Washington.
Campaign issue
Trump campaigned against the TPP trade deal that was negotiated during former President Barack Obama’s term, but never ratified by Congress. It would have covered trade with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Chile, Canada, Mexico and four other countries.
After signing an executive order to withdraw from the TPP and instead pursue bilateral trade agreements, Trump called it a “great thing for the American worker – what we just did.”
White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters that as Trump “has said many times, this type of multinational agreement is not in our best interest, and he’s moving quickly to advance trade policies that increase the competitiveness of the American worker and manufacturer.”
The TPP would have been the biggest regional trade deal in history, covering nearly 40 percent of the world’s economy and about a third of world trade. China didn’t take part in the talks, but appears ready to step into the vacuum and create its own deals with the Southeast Asian countries that would have been part of the 12-nation agreement.
Trump says he is not against trade deals, but wants more favorable terms for the United States that benefit American workers.
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