The CEOs of all three carmakers have visited Trump at the White House; Ford CEO Mark Fields and GM CEO Mary Barra have both joined councils and initiatives started by the new administration.
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By focusing on US automakers, Trump is ignoring major employers in Republican states (F, GM, FCAU)
The Detroit Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — are starting to enjoy what looks like a beautiful friendship with President Trump after a rough courtship during the campaign.
A BMW 3-Series sedan.
Left out of this process, so far, have been the so-called foreign "transplants" — the Japanese, Germans, and South Korean automakers that have spent decades establishing manufacturing operations in the US South (ironically, driven by protectionist policies that were undertaken during the Reagan years to favor US Big Three).
The political logic is straightforward enough: Trump and the Republican members of Congress who represent "Detroit South" don't have to worry about winning South Carolina or Alabama or Tennessee in the midterms or the 2020 presidential election.
But they do have to worry about Ohio and Michigan, states where the Big Three are major employers. They also have to worry about customers of the Big Three — Trump supporters who drive the big pickups that Ford, GM, and FCA build. Those voters make up the ultimate "buy American" block.
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A risky strategy
The risk in this strategy is that a renegotiation of NAFTA or a border tax to favor domestic manufacturing undermines the very effective business advantages that the transplants have discovered by building and hiring in the USA. Over the decades, they're created whole manufacturing ecosystems in the South that rival and in some cases exceed what's familiar in the upper Midwest.
Trump is acting like the auto industry can be restored to some kind of 1950s pre-eminence in the US, when GM controlled 50% of the market (it controls less than 20% today). But the industry is now thoroughly global, as BMW CEO Harald Krueger recently pointed out. This is from Bloomberg's Christopher Rauwald:
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