During a town hall in Warren, MI, Trump again repeated the lie that he “saved the auto industry” when asked what he would do to protect those jobs if God forbid he winds up back in the Oval Office again.
It’s hard to say what’s more astounding and enraging about this clip — the fact that he can’t answer a question without initially making everything about him — or the rambling revisionist history that followed the narcissism.
Here’s the question he was asked by an audience member.
AUTO WORKER: I thank you so much for coming to Michigan. My name is Ashley and I work at the Chrysler plant. Like many auto workers, I am deeply concerned about the future of our industry with many jobs being outsourced as we speak.
What actions will you take to ensure that our jobs stay in America so we can continue to build the best cars in the world here in Michigan?
And here’s his initial response where he lies about being named “Man of the Year” in Michigan and attacks the “fake news” for heaven forbid reporting that lie.
TRUMP: So pretty much as we’ve been saying, and what I want to do is, I want to be able to… look at your business… years ago in this area, I was honored as the Man of the Year. It was maybe 20 years ago. Oh, and the fake news heard about it. They said “It never happened. It never happened.” And I didn’t know who it was.
It was a group that honored me as Man of the Year. The fakers back there… see the fake news, but they said, oh, and they looked at it. You know, they said it never happened, but I said, I swear to you, it happened. It did happen. I was Man of the Year.
And I came and I made a speech and I said, why do you allow them to take your car business away? Why do you allow it to happen? They’re taking your business away. And I didn’t know too much about all. I know is they were taking your car industry away from you.
They said it never happened, and lo and behold, somebody said, I remember the event. And then we found out and we had everything. We got the awards, we had everything. It did happen.
But I gave a speech, which at the time was pretty controversial. We can’t let them take your car business away. It’s such an important business.
And you know, it’s an important business, even in times of war where they switch over.
And it was really something. And I looked at that speech from, I don’t know, it’s like 19, 20 years ago, and I could repeat it now without changing a word.
You’ll notice he didn’t even attempt to answer her question. He then almost gets back to the subject talking about other countries supposedly “taking advantage” of the United States.
TRUMP: You cannot let foreign countries and a lot of the times our worst foes are our so-called friends. Okay?
You know, our friends, the European. Union takes tremendous advantage of us. As an example, they give us cars by the millions. We don’t have too many Chevrolet’s in the middle of European cities, Okay?
European Union is brutal. They don’t take our farm products for the most part. They don’t take a lot.
Before moving onto lying about and attacking Kamala Harris for visiting the border, and still not answering the auto worker’s question.
TRUMP: But unlike… Kamala, who always complains and doesn’t do anything, you know, I keep saying, why don’t you do?
I saw Marsha the other day, why doesn’t she… why didn’t she do it four years ago almost?
And I say that, you know, she’s on the border today, trying just to go, what a day for the border! She goes to the border today, and they just announced just before she got up to speak that more than 13,000 murderers from jail, solitary confinement people in many cases, were released.
But I just say, let’s go back. So we can’t let them take our businesses. And we’re not going to let them take our businesses. And you can control that so easily through good policy.. not her kind of policy, by the way.
She changed her policy 15 times. No fracking. Oh, I like fracking. Defund the police. She wants to defund the police now, “Oh, I love the police” all of a sudden. By the way, when anybody is into defunding the police even for a day, during their career, they can no longer serve as President of the United States, I can tell you.
Trump finally proceeded to answer the woman’s question, and his response… brag about his tariffs on steel, despite the fact that his buddy Carl Icahn somehow knew to dump a bunch of steel-related holdings just prior to Trump’s threats, and the fact that his trade policies crashed the markets and hurt US economy at the time.
TRUMP: So… so we’re not going to let them take our businesses. And really, a lot of that’s determined by our taxation policy. When China has to pay all that money, the people that liked me the best were the steel companies, because I saved them.
They were dumping, China, and others, but mostly China was dumping steel in here at levels that nobody had ever seen before, and it was putting steel companies out of business. I put a 50 and a 100 percent tax on the dumping of steel, and the steel companies thrived. I saved them, and you have to ask the steel companies.
So we’ll do the same thing, and you, don’t worry about it. Here’s what you have to do. I only ask you to do one thing, and then you can sleep beautifully all night long, go to a job that you love, and get a lot of money at the end of the week.
You know what the thing is? Vote for Trump. If you vote for Trump, everything’s going to be better.
Trump’s policies gave incentives to the US auto industry to move their plants outside of the United States back in 2018, and he’ll do it again if given the chance.
We’ll see how long it takes the propagandists in right wing media to repeat the lies he was telling here.
