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Carmakers Thought Donald Trump Would Be Their Friend. Mexico Shows How Wrong They Were.
Think back to the first year of the Trump administration. The beaming members of his manufacturing council included the CEOs of Ford and Tesla.
Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, sat on another presidential panel, the Strategic and Policy Forum. Meanwhile Trump heaped praise on another auto chief, Sergio Marchionne of Fiat Chrysler.
“Right now, he is my favorite person in the room,” Trump said during a 2018 White House meeting on fuel economy standards, held a few months before Marchionne died.
And, from a corporate perspective, Trump’s anti-regulatory philosophy must have seemed like a reprieve following the environmentally focused Obama administration.
After all, Obama raised fuel economy standards. Even though his administration spent tens of billions on a federal bailout, he waxed favorably about electric vehicles and hybrids, and even owned one of the latter.
Trump’s effusiveness now seems in the distant past. compared with the potential nightmare that the car companies now face.
Obsessed with immigration, he has threatened to close the U.S.-Mexico border if Mexico does not stop migrants from crossing.
