As part of his continuing programme of How to lose friends and alienate people, German magazine Der Spiegel quoted Trump at the G7 meeting as saying: “The Germans are bad, very bad. Look at the millions of cars they’re selling in the U.S. We will stop that.”
A particular target seems to be BMW, from CNN:
Trump has taken aim at German carmakers before. In an interview in January, he said Germany’s BMW (BMWYY) should reconsider building a plant in Mexico, where it plans to start assembling the BMW 3 Series sedan in 2019.
“I would tell them, don’t waste their time and money — unless they want to sell to other countries,” he said. “But I would tell BMW if they think they’re gonna build a plant in Mexico and sell cars into the U.S. without a 35% tax, it’s not gonna happen.”
Trump does not seem to realise the largest BMW plant in the world is actually in South Carolina. BMW actually produces more cars in the US than it sells in the US.
BMW’s largest plant in the world is in Spartanburg, S.C., that employs 8,800 workers. The facility assembled more than 400,000 X model crossover vehicles last year, 70% of which were shipped to other countries. In fact, BMW is the largest U.S. exporter of cars. BMW builds far more cars at its U.S. plant than it sells here. In 2016 it sold 288,000 in the U.S.
Also President Trump seems unaware that German companies create a lot of jobs in the US, also from CNN:
Speaking before she met Trump in March, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “There are about 750,000 jobs created by German companies in the USA. If you multiply that by two or three, you can see that over 1-2 million jobs depend on German companies.”
The Independent reports that last month Angela Merkel had to explain the fundamentals of EU trade to Donald Trump 11 times.
“Ten times Trump asked [Ms Merkel] if he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time she replied, ‘You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only the EU,'” the official told The Times.
“On the eleventh refusal, Trump finally got the message, ‘Oh, we’ll do a deal with Europe then.'”
For fans of politics, Trump continues to be the best soap opera in town.
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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