(Breitbart) Industry insiders agree with former President Donald Trump’s suggestion that China is looking to annihilate American auto manufacturing on President Joe Biden’s watch.
During a speech in Ohio on Saturday, Trump warned Chinese President Xi Jinping that if he is reelected in November, China’s premier automakers will not be allowed to export their cheap Electric Vehicles (EVs) to the United States market without facing massive tariffs.
Most recently, reports circulated that China’s BYD is planning to build EV plants in Mexico to export the cars to the United States at low prices — thus drowning American-made competitors and dominating the EV market.
Trump said Biden’s allowing China to do so would be a “bloodbath” for American auto workers.
“Let me tell you something to China, if you’re listening President Xi — and you and I are friends but he understands the way I deal — those big, monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that and you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us, no,” Trump said:
In January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said if the U.S. does not hit China’s EVs with huge tariffs, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will have “pretty much delomish[ed]” the American auto industry.
“The Chinese car companies are the most competitive car companies in the world … so, I think they will have significant success outside of China depending on what kind of tariffs or trade barriers are established,” Musk said on a Tesla earnings call:
In February the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) issued a report detailing an “extinction-level event” for American auto workers should Biden allow China to export cheap EVs to the U.S. market.
“The introduction of cheap Chinese autos — which are so inexpensive because they are backed with the power and funding of the Chinese government — to the American market could end up being an extinction-level event for the U.S. auto sector, whose centrality in the national economy is unimpeachable,” AAM experts write:
Like Trump, AAM experts list hiking tariffs on China as the number one policy prescription for preventing the American auto industry from facing extinction.
“Impose exclusionary tariffs on all Chinese automobile imports to the United States, including both EVs and internal combustion engine vehicles,” the AAM report lists as one of its “Policy Recommendation.” “This could be accomplished through the existing Section 301 tariffs, imposed in 2018 and currently under review, or by way of launching a new investigation under Section 301 or other U.S. laws.”
