How Trump is turning the United States into China’s fool

Dearborn, Michigan. —When I look at the torrent of executive orders and tariffs that the president Donald Trump He has issued since he assumed the position, I fear being seeing the real version of that commercial of the Board of Certified Financial Planners that tries to show why the experience really matters.

In the commercial, a surgeon enters a hospital room and meets his patient.

First, the doctor calls Brenda and she says:

Then the doctor asks:

“So what leg are we going to operate on?”

And she says: “Do you mean the arm?”

The doctor then remains importance to his obvious concern and says:

“Everything is connected.”

Now totally terrified, the patient finally asks the surgeon:

“Are you sure it’s orthopedist?”

The doctor replies: “I am actually sagittarius.”

Sorry for my skepticism, but I have serious doubts about how much Trump and his team of budget surgeons have studied not only how to implement all the cuts, tariffs, freezing and dismissals that rushed to do, but also the long -term effects which will have American governance, commerce and investment.

Who is the work we are observing here?

That of a surgeon or that of a sagittarius?

Are we seeing the development of a plan that has been put to the test and modeling for months, with all its fully understood implications?

Or are we seeing the deployment of a paper napkin from the Mar-A-Lago bar with some half-elaborate ideas and then a chaotic imputed dispute between Trump and its assistants and wolves about which industries will be affected and which will be saved?

I find it difficult to say better than the editorial of The Wall Street Journalusually pro-trump, entitled “The most silly commercial war in history”, Which says:

“Trump will impose 25% tariffs to Canada and Mexico without any good reason.”

But Trump’s impulsive tariffs – which seems to announce and suspend at will – are symptomatic of a deeper challenge for US manufacturers I want to write today:

How American companies follow China’s rhythm in the industries of the future – artificial intelligence, advanced logic chips, electric vehicles, clean technology and autonomous cars – when these companies are constantly shaken among Democratic and Republican presidents in a world where these companies have to do multimillionaire bets five years in advance.

And they have to make those bets while competing against China, where the government wakes up every day and asks the manufacturers:

And let’s adopt together a long -term perspective on how to win globally.

To understand it better, I visited the Ford Motor headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, last week to see how it competes with the Chinese giant of electric vehicles.

Almost half of new car sales in China are electric battery or plug -in hybrid cars, and their companies control around 60% of the world market of these models.

The latter is largely due to the fact that China manufactures the best car batteries in the world, and any American car manufacturer who wants to be competitive in the electric vehicle business today needs the transfer of technology of batteries from China.

Let me repeat it a little slower:

To be worldwide competitive in the automobiles of the future, American car manufacturers need to transfer battery technology from China.

We are talking about a total change regarding what was happening 25 years ago, when China needed the transfer of technology of General Motors and Ford to build competitive cars at international level.

Here is the story in a few words.

Today the car industry is totally global.

A company like Ford has to balance its clients’ desire to have traditional combustion engines, plug -in hybrids or fully electric vehicles with increasing autonomous driving capabilities.

But he must do it in a world where China has made a massive bet for electric vehicles and is perfectly happy to ignore the US market for now and overcome Ford and other US manufacturers in Brazil, Indonesia, Europe and Africa.

So if Ford completely ignores the business of electric vehicles, delivers the rest of the world to China (and runs the risk of waking a day in five years and finding that most of the world works with Chinese electric vehicles) and only The United States remains.

To prevent such a disaster, Ford, like other American cars manufacturers, took advantage of the incentives offered by the Biden administration to build important factory of electric vehicles and batteries in the United States.

Ford is now close to completing the construction of a blue -foot blue battery battery park in Marshall, Michigan, which is expected to begin the production of iron and lithium phosphate batteries (LFP) in 2026 for vehicles Ford electric.

The installation is Absolute Property of Ford (an investment of approximately 2,000 million dollars), but the batteries that will produce for its electric vehicles are based on LFP technology graduated by the Chinese Batteries giant Catl.

They hope to create around 1,700 jobs.

(They would have been more, but there has been a slowdown in sales of electric vehicles in the United States due to the lack of load stations).

The Marshall factory was originally planned to be built in Mexico, but due to the incentives for electric vehicles by President Joe Biden, Ford transferred it to Michigan, as the system was supposed to work: the system:

Give our automotive companies tax credits to production and consumption until the industry reaches the necessary scale and can survive on its own. Exactly what China does.

But Ford needed a Chinese partner for his batteries.

No American battery manufacturer can currently match CATL batteries, which are loaded faster and travel further.

“Today cars are becoming digital transport devices,” said Jim Farley, executive director of Ford.

And China has been manufacturing batteries for 10 years for 10 years and in the creation of that integral digital driving experience, he said.

“Therefore, the way we compete with them is to get access to their intellectual property As they needed ours 20 years ago, and then using our innovative ecosystem, US ingenuity, our great scale and our intimacy with the client to overcome them worldwide. It will be one of the most important careers to save our industrial economy. ”

To that end, Ford is also preparing to start hiring personnel for the Blueoval City factory of 14 square kilometers and 5.6 billion dollars that it is completing in the city of Stanton, in the west of Tennessee, which includes a new manufacturing installation of manufacturing electric vehicles and batteries and a supplier park, and will also offer educational programs for “technical training, postsecundaria education and K-12 programs, including work-based learning experiences, with emphasis on Stem” in order to “prepare the Next generation to build the future of electric vehicles in the United States. ”

It sounds like a pretty good plan.

Shortly after being an oath – and without previously consulting Ford or, apparently, any other American car manufacturer – Trump revoked 2021’s executive order that sought to ensure that half of all new vehicles sold in the United States in 2030 They were electric.

Trump also ordered to stop the distribution of government funds not spent for vehicle load stations of a fund of 5 billion dollars, and said he was considering eliminating fiscal credits for electric vehicles, the base on which Ford made the huge commitment For these two new factories.

It is precisely the type of myopic thinking and starts and stops that put us in this mess first.

American compatriots, do you know why we are so behind China today in terms of batteries for electric vehicles?

First, China graduates many more electrical and automotive engineers than us.

But secondly, American innovators invented the revolutionary Catl LFP battery technology for electric vehicles, but gave it to China.

Do you think I am inventing it?

This is the brief story of Bloomberg:

“In the mid -1990s, a compound called iron and lithium phosphate (LFP), the main chemistry of batteries that now use CATL and most battery companies in China, was discovered by scientists from the scientists of the Texas University in Austin And marketed a few years later by the emerging company A123 Systems LLC ”, which in 2009 received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama administration, hoping that it would boost an electric car industry in the United States.

But the demand did not exist yet.

Thus, in 2013, the article added, “the largest auto parts company in China at that time bought at123 after bankruptcy” and a decade later China controlled “the 83% of all the manufacture of lithium -ion batteries”.

The United States “is now at least a decade behind China in regard to the manufacture of batteries, both in terms of the necessary technology and capacity, industry experts say.”

Beijing understood that he could never win the game of internal combustion engines, so he made the leap to the “software defined vehicle” that continues to improve with digital updates.

That is the electric vehicle, and its fundamental technology is the battery.

The Chinese do not call these “green” cars.

The American style is: invent, ignore, advance with an administration and then go back with the next.

As well as the vicinity of steel, coal, combustion engines and manual work created a multiplier effect in the twentieth century, the ecosystem of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced batteries, clean technology, autonomous driving systems and work Digitized mental will do the same in the 21st century.

If the United States is absent from any part of that ecosystem, it will be left behind.

Tariffs only allow a country Buy time so that their companies can make the necessary changes to compete without walls.

Trump’s strategy is to damage the exports of our automotive companies with a tariff wall and then shoot them behind the wall.

If Trump had common sense, I would say:

I am in favor of all of the above -gasoline coches, plug -in hybrids, see totally electric and autonomous cars -, the only thing that matters to me is that you buy American.

And to make sure that our great US manufacturers of VE can reach scale, I will use the money of tariffs to do what progressive democratic fools refused to do:

Approve a bill to build a national transmission network and a network of fast charging stations, so that anyone who bought a VE never has to worry about long distance trips.

This is how it becomes large to the United States.

Anything else is to pretend.