The American manufacturing workers at Harley-Davidson are praising President Trump’s newest tariffs on steel and aluminum, blaming the motorcycle company for closing more U.S. factories.
This week, Harley-Davidson executives announced that amid new tariffs on European steel and aluminum imposed by the Trump administration, the company would be outsourcing more American manufacturing jobs overseas.
Trump immediately hit back at Harley-Davidson, saying the company was using his tariffs on steel and aluminum as an “excuse” to continue sending American jobs overseas, as they have been doing for years now.
“If they move, watch, it will be the beginning of the end – they surrendered, they quit!” Trump wrote online. “The Aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before!”
When NPR caught up with Harley-Davidson workers at the company’s Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin factory, all of the workers praised Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum.
“If you really look at it, it’s the people … that different countries that have been kind of burdening us with these unfair tariffs over the last decade and is trying to correct the course now is really who is to blame,” one Harley-Davidson worker said.
Another worker said, “He’s just trying to save American industry.”
“The president must have a good reason for doing battle against U.S. trading partners,” another worker told NPR. “He wouldn’t do it for no reason. I look at him as a very smart businessman and if he feels it’s what he needed to do, that’s what he needed to do.”
At the Kansas City, Missouri factory for Harley-Davidson — which as Breitbart News reported is being shut down and outsourced to Thailand — a manufacturing worker blasted the motorcycle company for soon sending his job overseas.
“Their tax breaks, their 20-year tax breaks, it’s gone,” the worker said. “So now they’re moving overseas so they can get a better tax break. That’s what it’s all about. It’s all about the dollar.”
That worker said he supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election and would vote for him again.
In March, Harley-Davidson — which was saved by tariffs on imported motorcycles back in 1983 — slammed Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum just as they were laying off hundreds of American workers and moving their jobs to Thailand, as Breitbart News reported.
In January, Harley-Davidson announced that it would be closing its plant in Kansas City and moving leftover production to York, Pennsylvania. The decision to close the Kansas City plant will result in about 260 American manufacturing workers losing their jobs.
Last year, as Breitbart News reported, about 183 American workers were laid off by the motorcycle company in Kansas City and Menomonee Falls.
Free trade agreements like KORUS and NAFTA aided in opening up overseas markets for multinational companies to outsource their American manufacturing jobs to countries like Mexico, leaving millions of Americans laid off in the process.
If Trump had not immediately stopped the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement when he took office, economists estimated that not only would the elimination of millions of American jobs have occurred, but U.S. wages would have been further depleted.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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