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TheBlackAdder

(28,211 posts) Sun Mar 29, 2020, 10:27 AM Mar 2020

Trump Tweets Orders To GM To Make Ventilators At A Factory They Sold Last Year

For days, General Motors and Ventec Life Systems had been working on a deal that would use GM’s manufacturing capability to accelerate production of Ventec’s ventilators. Together, the two companies projected they could make as many as 80,000 ventilators over the next two months. The federal government’s contribution to this deal was simple enough: they would agree to buy most of these ventilators, providing GM with an up-front payment to help cover the cost of converting an existing auto plant in Indiana for the task. GM assured officials there was no issue with retooling, and Ventec and GM were reportedly moving at “breakneck speed” to meet the critical medical need.
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Instead, the deal—which reportedly included some ace negotiation from Jared Kushner—collapsed.
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But by lunchtime on Friday, Trump was ready to move to the next phase of this problem: blaming everyone but himself. First Trump pointed the finger at GM CEO Mary Barra, saying “things are always a mess” when she is involved. Trump ended that tweet with “Invoke P!”, which was apparently not a reference to anything that happened in a Moscow hotel but how all the cool kids are saying “I am going to invoke the Defense Production Act to order this done.”

Minutes later, Trump declared that GM “MUST” reopen their “stupidly abandoned” plant in Lordstown, Ohio and “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!!” That’s six exclamation points, which apparently means “without a contract.” Trump then made the same demand, with equal use of capital letters, of Ford, which had been working on its own to design a system for repurposing existing parts for ventilators.

The problem with these demands—other than everything about them—was that Trump not only referenced a dead Twitter account that doesn’t belong to General Motors, but the factory he called on them to use isn’t theirs. GM sold the factory last year to a startup company working on an electric pickup.

So Trump told the wrong Twitter account that GM has to start making ventilators using someone else’s factory, even though he pulled out of the deal to have GM make ventilators. And, after days of resisting all requests from governors and all officials, he appears to have invoked the Defense Production Act via a tweet so cryptically worded that he came back a half hour later to explain that “Invoke ‘P’ means Defense Production Act!”

https://crooksandliars.com/2020/03/trump-orders-gm-make-ventilators-tweet