It’s a little sad that I must immediately be suspicious of the President when he says something, but when he voiced negative comments about the efforts of GM to produce ventilators on an emergency basis, the red flags went up:
“Our negotiations with GM regarding its ability to supply ventilators have been productive, but our fight against the virus is too urgent to allow the give-and-take of the contracting process to continue to run its normal course,” Trump said in a statement. “GM was wasting time. Today’s action will help ensure the quick production of ventilators that will save American lives.” [WaPo]
That action, taken on Friday, was Trump’s first invocation of the Defense Production Act., used to order GM to produce ventilators (in concert with Ventec Life Systems), but then he followed it up:
“As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out,” Trump tweeted. “They said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, ‘very quickly’. Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar.”
“Always a mess with Mary B.,” he added, referring to Barra, the company’s chief executive.
And CEO Barra’s response?
GM responded that i’ts been “working around the clock for weeks to meet this urgent need” and that its commitment to build the ventilators “has never wavered.”
“We are proud to stand with other American companies and our skilled employees to meet the needs of this global pandemic,” said Mary Barra, GM’s chairman and CEO.
At this juncture, independents are wondering what’s going on, while the Trump cultists will be stirred up since, well, their Great Leader doesn’t like GM. So what’s going on? Aaron Blake provides enlightenment the next day:
While discussing why he invoked the Defense Production Act on Friday to force General Motors to build ventilators, he acknowledged what has been a long-standing beef with the auto company: the closure of a plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
Remarkably, Trump brought that up even as he was asked specifically why he had singled GM out for this step before any other company. He dismissed the idea that it was about cost and instead cited GM’s decisions on where to house its plants.
“We don’t want to think too much about cost when we’re talking about this. This is not cost,” Trump said. “I wasn’t happy where General Motors built plants in other locations over the years. . . . And so I didn’t go into it with a very favorable view. I was extremely unhappy with Lordstown, Ohio — where they left Lordstown, Ohio, in the middle of an auto boom because we had 17 car companies coming in and then they were leaving one plant in Ohio.” [WaPo]
Aaron has more, but it’s become clear this is a two-fer for President Trump.
First, he casts blame on someone else for his blundering response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every time a reporter brings it up, he’ll point at GM (and Ford, it turns out) and blame them for not supplying cheap ventilators.
And the reporters won’t just laugh at him and tell him to try again, which is the best course of action with an inveterate liar.
Second, he gets to cast GM and Big Auto as the enemies of the Trump cult. They take away their factories and thus Trump can hide his own failures and mistreatments of his own workers, including illegal immigrants, behind the big asses of GM and Ford.
He’ll try to pin blame – on a woman, too, from a known misogynist – on companies that don’t even normally make ventilators while refusing to accept one iota of blame for himself.
He’s quite the recalcitrant one.
