“Many @harleydavidson owners plan to boycott the company if manufacturing moves overseas,” President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday. “Great! Most other companies are coming in our direction, including Harley competitors. A really bad move! U.S. will soon have a level playing field, or better.”
The spat with Harley-Davidson began in June when the company announced that it would move some of its operations overseas in order to lessen the impact of tariffs imposed by the European Union in response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum. The motorcycle manufacturer’s decision may have had more to do with declining demand in the North American market than the E.U.’s retaliatory levies, but it provoked the president into ranting against one of America’s most revered companies.
His America-First rabble-rousing may be ill-advised as economic policy, and there’s something outrageous about an American president endorsing a boycott of an American company. But at least he’s consistent.
Or is he?
It’s one thing for the president to fulminate against Harley-Davidson. That company’s blue-collar fans, at least in Trump’s view of the world, are apt to be angry at the prospect of a distinctively American company taking its operations abroad, even in part. But what if a different sort of company—just as distinctively American but more uppity—decides to sell itself entirely to the Chinese state?
We’re thinking of Steinway, the great maker of pianos. The company was founded in 1853 in Manhattan by the German immigrant Heinrich Steinweg. Since 2013 it’s been owned by the investment firm Paulson & Co. (founded and run by hedge fund manager John Paulson), and it’s headquartered in Queens, with another factory in Hamburg, Germany. Steinway is among the world’s four or five greatest piano manufacturers.
Famously American it may be, but the company is currently in buyout talks with a state-owned Chinese company. The China Poly Group, a conglomerate with holdings in defense manufacturing, real estate, and the arts. The Poly Group has close ties to the family of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and is run by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, or SASAC, a commercial arm of the Chinese government. If the sale goes through, China will acquire an old and renowned American company. Whether the Chinese firm has plans to move Steinway closer to the burgeoning Chinese piano market is not known.
If that sale happens, we expect to see a full-on Donald Trump tirade. Steinway sells high-end musical instruments to wealthy people in the arts, not motorbikes to blue-collar Trump fans, but we’re sure that won’t make a difference.
