A Chinese manufacturing plant has received an order to begin producing President Trump’s 2020 campaign flags, according to its owner Li Jiang.
The company, which was used by both the Clinton and Trump campaigns to make their flags in 2016, is including “made in China” on each of its products, NPR reports. This would appear to break a campaign promise that the committee organized to elect Trump would only “buy American.”
“All the way through 2020 and beyond, we will proudly continue to sell American products and introduce new ones on www.shop.donaldjtrump.com to help Make America Great Again,” the committee’s executive director, Michael Glassner, wrote in a July 2017 statement.
Every component of official Trump merchandise has been “100% Made in the USA,” Glassner claimed then.
The president has recently made headlines for threatening Harley Davidson after the motorcycle manufacturer shifted some of its production outside the U.S. to avoid retaliatory tariffs imposed by the European Union. Trump suggested that they have given up on the American people and that is was the “beginning of the end” for their business.
Trump has made “fair-trading” over “free-trading” one of the highlights of his presidency, and has moved ahead on tariffs on imports from countries like China. But that apparently hasn’t stopped his re-election effort from making purchases overseas.
Li, calling his clients “very smart” and dismissing concerns of a trade war, said his company has “a big price advantage over their competitors.”
“They would always go to the cheapest place. If China is cheap, they go to China. If America is cheap, they go to America,” he added.
