The Return of American Industry

Donald Trump:

"But if you look and compare everything before I took office, domestic auto production has gone up by 18,000 cars a month—and we haven’t even started yet, because many of these plants are not even built. It’s up 18,000 because Ford, General Motors, and a couple more, Stellantis, are taking their existing plants and, as fast as they can, they’re expanding them. So when their new plants open—because they’re building big, modern, beautiful auto factories—think about that: we’re up 18,000 cars a month, and essentially all they’ve done so far is try to make good use of their space while their big new plants are coming online.

I hope you remember it was this way. I hope this table gets a lot of the credit for what’s happening—that it gets all the credit—because this never would have happened otherwise. We were running out of business and losing everywhere. All the auto plants were leaving this country. Now they’re all coming back—and they’re coming from Canada, from Mexico, but also from Germany. They’re coming from all over the world.

Domestic steel production has gone up by 100,000 tons of steel per week. We have a 50% tariff on steel, aluminum, and several other things. Copper was just included, and that means people are going to want to produce steel here. We just made a deal with U.S. Steel. As you know, an outside company came in and invested 17 billion dollars to build new plants, new facilities—everything new. It’s tremendous, and it all stays here in the United States.

We’re doing an incredible job with steel, and domestic oil production has gone up by more than 300,000 barrels per day. That’s a lot of barrels, and we’re going to talk about that in a moment. These two—Chris and Doug—have done a fantastic job. Also, we have the price of oil at about $62 a barrel.

So that you understand, because a lot of you like to talk about costs and prices, I see so much fake information. Product costs have gone down. Energy has gone way down. Energy makes everything go down—you know, with energy. That’s what happened with Biden: he shut down our program and then went back to it when he realized it looked like people were going to be paying prices nobody had ever seen, like $7 a gallon.

They were going to pay $7 a gallon, they were at $7, $7.50. So immediately he went back to Trump’s plan that they had canceled."