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Trump threatened John Deere. This is just his latest attempt to intimidate a legendary American company.

 


CNN New York —

Apple, General Motors, John Deere and Facebook have at least two things in common: They are iconic American companies and they faced the wrath of former President Donald Trump.

Trump, more than any other US president in modern history, has directly targeted individual US businesses, threatening them with everything from boycotts to canceling federal contracts to incredibly high tariffs.

Deere, the agricultural equipment maker founded nearly 200 years ago, became the latest famous brand to be singled out by Trump.

The former president threatened Monday to use his favorite weapon by imposing massive tariffs on Deere if the company does not abandon plans to move some of its production from the Midwest to Mexico.

Experts warn such a move would hurt U.S. farmers, help Chinese manufacturers and violate the trade deal signed by Trump. From a broader perspective, the attack on Deere is part of a broader pattern of Trump bullying businesses when it suits him.

It reminds us of the chaos and unpredictability CEOs could face if voters return Trump to the White House.

Trump is proving to be an anti-capitalist, Bill George, former CEO of medical device maker Medtronic, told CNN in a telephone interview. It is a mistake to isolate companies. These are not bad companies. It's not like they're making a dangerous product or violating US law.

Even before arriving at the White House, Trump enthusiastically attacked individual companies on the campaign trail.

In February 2016, during his campaign for president, Trump called for a boycott of Apple until the company helped the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. (Apple did not comply, but the FBI said the information went into the phone anyway.)

Trump has attacked Amazon several times, including a 2018 incident that shook investors in which he claimed the company was defrauding the U.S. Postal Service.

Trump attacked Boeing over the cost of Air Force One, threatened General Motors over where it planned to build its cars, denounced Nordstrom for abandoning his daughter's brand and lambasted Merck after its CEO at the time, Ken Frazier, left a presidential council to protest Trump. comments about a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Most recently, meta-platforms lost billions of dollars in March after Trump called CNBC and called Facebook the enemy of the people. And then, of course, there are the countless attacks on individual media outlets and their corporate overlords.

On Friday evening, Trump threatened to sue Google for only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump.

Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst and professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said there have been times when presidents have gone after particular industries that were causing problems .

For example, Presidents Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy fought against the steel industry. And President Teddy Roosevelt targeted specific companies that he believed were abusing the system.

But in the modern era, such a targeted approach is very unusual, Zelizer said.

Trump's approach of singling out companies can distort markets and create an inhospitable environment for businesses, Zelizer said.

This can create dangerous incentives for corrupt decisions by presidents who act for political rather than economic reasons, Zelizer said, adding that Trump's tactics are at fundamental odds with conservative philosophy.

Trump raised eyebrows by threatening to impose 200% tariffs on Deere if the company continued with plans to lay off workers in the Midwest and shift some production to Mexico by the end of 2026.

I just informed John Deere right now, if you do that, well, put a 200% tariff on anything you want to sell in the United States, Trump said Monday during a roundtable with farmers in western Pennsylvania, adding that Deere is hurting our farmers. and harm our manufacturing.

Yet George, now a Harvard University executive, warns that a 200 percent tariff on Deere would backfire on the very people Trump claims to be trying to help.

This will increase prices for American farmers. These tariffs will be passed on to farmers, he said. John Deere is an exceptional company. It's an American treasure. And tariffs will only weaken American businesses, not strengthen them.

Christine McDaniel, a top trade official under former President George W. Bush, told CNN that if Deere responded to Trump's tariff threat by abandoning plans to move production to Mexico, it would make the company less competitive on a global scale.

Ultimately, that would lead to fewer sales, revenues, growth and fewer people for John Deere, said McDaniel, now a senior fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, who supported Vice President Kamala Harris for president, told Fox News this week that Trump's threat of 200% tariffs on John Deere would only make it easier for Chinese companies to steal business at Deere.

This is the definition of insanity, Cuban said.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized Trump for the attack on Deere.

Hard to believe, but Donald Trump is giving corporate America reason to think Kamala Harris might be better for their business, the Journal wrote in an opinion piece earlier this week titled “A Deere in Trump's Political Headlights” . What Mr. Trump doesn't understand is that American manufacturers compete in global markets.

Not only are they competitive in global markets, but they also operate under a free trade agreement in North America. Trump himself campaigned for replacing NAFTA, then signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020.

Yet several experts told CNN that imposing a 200% tariff on Deere would be a blatant violation of the USMCA.

McDaniel pointed out that under the USMCA, the United States agreed to a tariff schedule that stipulates that Washington agreed to a zero tariff on agricultural equipment, the main product manufactured by Deere. (McDaniel noted that, technically, the U.S. president could declare certain imports from Mexico a national security threat and then attempt to impose tariffs under Section 232).

Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, worries that tariff threats against some companies could set a dangerous precedent.

It would essentially be a government buyout of the company, telling them how to allocate capital, Lovely told CNN in a phone interview. This goes against what we think of as American capitalism.

Captains of industry could face troubled waters in the years to come if Trump wins in November, with all-caps tweets (or truths?) plunging their stock prices and plunging their business plans into the doldrums. chaos.

Former Medtronic boss George urges CEOs not to be intimidated.

Do what's right for your business, he said. Don't be intimidated.

Sources

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2/ https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/29/business/trump-tariffs-deere-attack-companies/index.html

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