In yet another Pennsylvania visit, former President Donald Trump reiterated that if elected, he’d oppose the sale of U.S. Steel to a Japanese firm.
Seventy years ago, Trump told a crowd at Precision Custom Components, U.S. Steel was “one of our country’s greatest companies.”
“And now we have Japan buying it,” he said, referring to a potential sale to Nippon Steel Corporation proposed last fall. “You don’t want to sell U.S. Steel. This is how we’ll rediscover the industrial heritage of our country.”
Trump said this past winter that he opposed the sale, but has rarely mentioned it since. President Joe Biden has argued against it as well, though company executives and some economists say it could mean more domestic investment in the business.
But Trump said blocking the sale would be part of an effort to “reclaim our manufacturing legacy,” by ramping up production of American goods and protecting jobs in the steel and fracking industries.
Other countries “plunder our nation into poverty,” Trump said, adding that he wants countries to depend on the U.S., not the other way around. He proposed an expansion of tariffs on countries like China, which he said would reduce taxes on U.S. workers.
“It’s a tax on a foreign producer,” he said. “An eye for an eye.”
That’s where he and Vice President Kamala Harris differ, he added.
Trump seized on a comment made in 2019 by Harris, who then supported a ban on fracking. Though Trump referred to Harris in York as “the job killer-in-chief,” she has since walked back her position on the natural gas industry, after first bringing it up during the 2019 presidential primary race.
“We’re sitting on the largest amount of oil – liquid gold, I call it,” Trump said. “We have more liquid gold than Saudi Arabia, we have more liquid gold than Russia. But we don’t use it, we go out and buy it from other countries at ridiculous prices.”
(In fact, domestic production of oil and gas has been at or near record levels in recent years.)
Trump’s appearance came just two days after a rally in Wilkes-Barre. But unlike that event or a July appearance in Harrisburg, he showed up promptly and largely stuck to a scripted speech whose theme was centered on economic policy.
The event was also not the large-scale rally that has been a mainstay of Trump’s campaign style. A few hundred supporters were invited into a large, open industrial space before 2 p.m. Douglas George, chairman of the York County Republican Committee, said the event came together quickly after he got a Friday afternoon phone call that Trump would be in the area today.
The crowd was often quiet, but tended to become more engaged on the few occasions he spoke spontaneously. They cheered when he contended that “the fake media” needs to become “real media,” and when he portrayed Democrat Kamala Harris’ support of green energy as a “Green New Scam.”
As he has at other gatherings, Trump referred to Harris as “Comrade Kamala,” and described her father, Donald, as a Marxist economist. Fact-checkers have said the claim about her father is true, as Donald Harris’ work as a Stanford University professor focused on the economics of inequality. But other reports have noted that the vice president’s career as a prosecutor in California were not consistent with far-left politics.
Republican Congressional representatives Scott Perry and Dan Meuser were among those in attendance, but did not give remarks.
