On Sunday, President Trump took to Twitter to make demands of U.S. auto manufacturer General Motors.
Just spoke to Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors about the Lordstown Ohio plant. I am not happy that it is closed when everything else in our Country is BOOMING. I asked her to sell it or do something quickly. She blamed the UAW Union — I don’t care, I just want it open!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
He reiterated such demands on Monday, making personal suggestions for the company and the industry of Lordstown, Ohio:
General Motors and the UAW are going to start “talks” in September/October. Why wait, start them now! I want jobs to stay in the U.S.A. and want Lordstown (Ohio), in one of the best economies in our history, opened or sold to a company who will open it up fast! Car companies…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2019
….are all coming back to the U.S. So is everyone else. We now have the best Economy in the World, the envy of all. Get that big, beautiful plant in Ohio open now. Close a plant in China or Mexico, where you invested so heavily pre-Trump, but not in the U.S.A. Bring jobs home!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2019
Those demands and personal intervention, however, are akin to the state-led economy Trump and his advisers so often rail against Beijing for running.
Indeed, one of the prime targets of Trump’s critique of China and the basis of his trade war is the Made in China 2025 initiative. That project, the name of which has now been dropped, is an attempt by China to capture key developing industries, keeping jobs and technology concentrated in China at the expense of the U.S. and other countries.
Trump’s anger at GM is simply a backward-looking expression of the same principle: state intervention in the market for political gain, with national legitimacy staked on economic development.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with encouraging companies to give back to the U.S. or benefit local communities. But fostering those ideas is quite different from the unilateral demands Trump has made about GM and its Ohio facility, which aim to directly interfere with the company’s business decisions.
Worse than undue political interference, demands that companies and industries dance to Washington’s tune likely spells long-term economic ruin. Consider Trump’s demand that GM reopen a plant that it didn’t think was in its best interest to operate. This sort of political business decision-making — the very sort of thing Republicans criticized President Obama for doing — leads to far worse consequences than the shuttering of one plant and the loss of jobs. After all, it’s better to have GM, even with plants operating abroad, than to lose a key company for U.S. manufacturing entirely.
From his perch in the Oval Office, Trump seems to see himself less as the president of the United States and more as a wannabe Chinese Communist Party boss bent on pursuing economic development by calling the shots on which businesses open, when and where.
Such an approach ill-serves both the economy Trump depends on so much for his political future and the credibility of U.S. aspirations to free trade.
