Trump’s New Auto Rollback Is an Economic Disaster
In the spring of 1944, as the Allies secretly prepared to invade France, a midwestern factory with the pleasant name of Willow Run produced one B-24 heavy bomber every hour. An astonishing feat, even now. Every day, 125 miles of copper wire and 8.6 million rivets went in one end of the factory’s mile-long assembly line; every day, 24 completed airplanes, each two stories tall and 110 feet wide, came out the other. Then these strange newborns taxied to the airfield next door, met a waiting crew, and took off for Europe. This is how 42,000 Americans—working full-time at a place that had been, a few years earlier, a small farm outside Detroit—furnished a violent war nearly 4,000 miles away. If the great in “Make America great again” refers to anything just and mighty, it means Willow Run.
Little wonder, then, that Donald Trump chose the old factory for the site of his first visit to Michigan as president. It was March 15, 2017, and Trump was in a jubilant mood. “I love the people of this state,” he told a crowd of autoworkers and their C-suite bosses. “You did me a big favor.” Months earlier, Michigan had, by the narrowest margin in its history, delivered Trump its 16 Electoral College votes. The state had not gone red in a presidential election in 28 years.
Trump had a good idea how he had flipped it. “During the campaign, I came to Michigan again and again, and I made this promise, that I am going to fight for your jobs,” he said. Now he would make good on that vow. He claimed to have persuaded the “Big Three” American automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Fiat Chrysler—to preserve or create a total of 3,600 auto jobs in the United States. But the country needed to think bigger. “We must embrace a new economic model,” he said. “Let’s call it the ‘American model.’”
With this declaration, Trump began one of the greatest fiascos of his presidency. His initiative would eventually entangle three federal agencies, four automakers, and 13 states. It would devour decades of billable time from legions of corporate lobbyists and lawyers. And it would stymie every person who hoped to buy a new car in the United States from 2021 to 2026—or, for that matter, every person who planned to use an American highway, or breathe American air.
That day
