Under a Trump administration, American manufacturers will have to build their products in the United States or pay to get them back into the country, a confident Donald Trump told The Blade in an exclusive interview before his speech Wednesday in the Huntington Center.
“You have to be ready to walk,” Mr. Trump said in an interview at the center with Blade politics writer Tom Troy.
“I’ve been [talking] from 7 in the morning,” Mr. Trump said as he helped himself to a soda in a small refrigerator before starting a 9-minute conversation that ended when he was reminded it was time to face the crowd in the arena. With him, along with staffers and Secret Service agents, was his son, Eric Trump.
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“Big crowd, huh? They have 7,000 inside, and thousands outside trying to get in. Doesn’t happen for anyone else, I’ll tell you right now,” he said.
When it was suggested that Democrat Hillary Clinton might also be able to draw a large crowd in Toledo, he said, “she won’t have the crowd.”
Eight years ago, Barack Obama, running for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton, filled 10,000 seats in the University of Toledo’s Savage Center, with an estimated 5,000 turned away.
So far, Mrs. Clinton has not held a presidential campaign rally in Toledo, though she held a rally in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign in Whitmer High School gymnasium that drew 3,000 people.
Mr. Trump said he had not been to Toledo before, though he reminisced about having his first job redeveloping a family-owned apartment complex in Cincinnati.
Consulting printed notes that he said contained statistics that were prepared for him, Mr. Trump said, “I was very surprised to see how rough Toledo is doing. Your jobs are being drained out.’’
“Ohio has lost one in three manufacturing jobs since Bill Clinton signed an agreement to put China into the World Trade [Organization]. Just in a short while, I mean it’s crazy,” he said.
He suggested manufacturers would be able to find cheaper ways to make products in the United States if Mexico won’t accommodate the trade agreement changes he would want to make to rebalance the trade deficit with Mexico.
Mr. Trump’s website spells out steps he would take to enforce existing trade laws and that he would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
He did not detail how he would renegotiate NAFTA, which lowered trade barriers with Mexico and Canada and has allowed manufacturers to open plants in Mexico where labor and other costs are cheaper and sell those products at a cheaper cost in the United States.
“Look at all the businesses you’ve lost in Toledo. All of these businesses have left for different places. Mexico has a lot of them,” Mr. Trump said. He said Mexico is “a miracle.”
NAFTA was enacted in 1993, and China was granted permanent normal trading relations in 2001.
Told that his vice presidential running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, had opposed the government’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009 to avoid a destructive bankruptcy, Mr. Trump said there’s no way of knowing whether that was the only option.
“That’s OK. They never let the free market determine what could have happened. There were a lot of very smart people who said if they would have done very little, it would have ironed itself out,” Mr. Trump said.
There were also many experts who said that a “disorderly” bankruptcy of the two automakers would have had spin-off effects that would have cost more than 1 million jobs.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ohio has seen a decline in manufacturing employment from 1,067,500 manufacturing jobs in July, 1990, compared with 687,000 manufacturing jobs in July, 2015.
Mr. Trump said Mrs. Clinton is following his lead on the situation involving NAFTA.
“She’s getting clobbered because she’s losing in all the polls. I hear we’re leading in Ohio now,” he said.
In a debate in Cleveland in 2008, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama were asked about NAFTA.
“I especially want to fix NAFTA,” Mrs. Clinton said at that time. “It’s easy to criticize. I have a plan to do that.”
Mrs. Clinton lost the primary to Mr. Obama, who had campaigned against NAFTA and who had criticized Mrs. Clinton for past support of the treaty.
Asked about his plans for destroying the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the brutal Islamist group that has exported terror to Western countries, Mr. Trump steered away from predicting a renewed U.S. military presence in the Middle East.
“I get other people to fight and we get it knocked down. There are a lot of other countries that have to help. We’re not going to be fighting anything alone.
“Essentially we’re in a war already. They knocked down the World Trade Center,” he said, citing recent new outbreaks of terrorism in the United States and Europe.
“People are afraid to go out [because of terrorism],” he said.
Mr. Trump said he would be an advocate of clean air and water.
“I am a very big believer. If you look at what’s happening with global warming and what’s going on with China and these other countries, they’re not doing anything about global warming, and it’s costing our companies a fortune because they’re unable to compete because they’re working so hard toward meeting these within certain standards.
“What I want is clean air and clean water. Very important to me,” Mr. Trump said.
“But we also want jobs. We have to bring jobs back, and a lot of these regulations and restrictions are making it hard to compete,” the candidate said during his speech.
Asked what legislation his administration might get behind, he mentioned “clean coal.”
Contact Tom Troy: tomtroy@theblade.com or 419-724-6058 or on Twitter @TomFTroy.
First Published July 28, 2016, 4:35 a.m.
