Former President Donald Trump says the United States auto industry will be wiped out by outsourcing to Mexico if Vice President Kamala Harris wins next month’s presidential election.
“If I don’t win, those factories [in Mexico] are going to wipe out this country,” Trump said during a panel at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday.
“They’re the biggest factories ever built for cars, they’re going to wipe out this country,” he continued. “If she wins, and she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing … every speech I’ve made having to do with cars and tariffs, I’ve mentioned how threatened our country’s been by Mexico.”
Trump told a story of an auto executive he had met with about nine months ago, asking to tour the automaker’s largest factory in the United States. The auto executive, Trump described, said the largest factories were planned for Mexico in the hopes of selling the cars in the United States market without any tariffs.
Last week, Trump said he saw the auto executive again, who told him that the plans to build the giant factories in Mexico had been put on hold because they believe the former president will beat Harris in the election and threaten them with tariffs.
“I told them, and I said it publicly, they’re not going to sell one car into the United States,” Trump said. “I said, if I am going to be president of the United States, if I run this country, I’m going to put a 100, 200, 2,000 percent tariff — they’re not going to sell one car into the United States because we’re not going to destroy our country.”
“I said I’m going to put … the highest tariff in history. I see the guy by accident, and he said they’d abandoned [plans to build in Mexico],” Trump continued.
While Trump campaigns on massively increasing tariffs, Harris has campaigned as a proponent of free trade, attacking his plans for imposing across-the-board tariffs on all foreign imports.
Billionaire Mark Cuban, Harris’s top economic surrogate, has similarly attacked Trump’s plans for more and higher tariffs on foreign imports to protect American industries and jobs.
Trump, though, said he is deeply invested in shielding the American auto industry from devastation at the hands of Chinese automakers building plants in Mexico to then sell their cars in the U.S. market.
“China is building massive auto plants in Mexico. And they’re going to build them and they’re going to take those cars and sell them into the United States; they’re very near the border,” Trump said. “They’re going to have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages and that’s going to be the end of Michigan, the end of South Carolina, the end of everything.”
“If you don’t [impose tariffs], this country has no chance,” he continued.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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