This was well publicized by all the media at the moment. The Ford CEO Mark Fields was interviewed by the news media and appeared at all times with a big smile not showing any worry but instead showing his admiration and respect for Donald Trump. Donald Trump, the man who grabbed the US presidency by promising the return of American jobs that were being exported to Mexico, apparently making good on his promise with the help of Ford and using it as a shining example of things to come. According to Trump, there was much more to follow after the Ford cancellation of its project in Mexico, meaning the return of all US manufacturing plants from Mexico, wielding as a menacing threat against both US companies and Mexico the promise of dismantling of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that Trump as a presidential candidate called in many occasions a disaster, warning that he would either renegotiate NAFTA or pull the USA out of NAFTA altogether. Ford Motor Company, in order to please the incoming President, cancelled all the construction plans of a major Ford manufacturing plant that was in the process of being built in the state of San Luis Potosi, a move that was taken by many Mexicans as a very serious offense which triggered a call for a national boycott in Mexico against all products manufactured and sold in Mexico by Ford Motor Company. Donald Trump was dumb enough to have overlooked the basic fact that a lot of Ford vehicles being manufactured in Mexico were being sold right in Mexico to Mexican customers just before Trump and Ford agreed on aborting the San Luis Potosi Ford plant. There is reason to believe that the Mexican national boycott against Ford Motor Company in Mexico has already hurt Ford in the bottom line, and people from other Latin American countries who dislike the xenophobic racist discourse of Donald Trump are also seizing the opportunity to join Mexicans in the boycott against Ford in order to send a clear message not only to Ford but mainly to Donald Trump that patience with him has grown thin. There are also signs that the idea of a boycott against Ford is not only gaining acceptance in Latin American countries, but it is also beginning to spread among Latinos now living in the USA, besides gaining support in Europe in countries such as Spain which have deep historical ties to Mexico. This could end up being a major public relations disaster for Ford, not to say the bottom line which is the focus of the boycott, hurting Ford where it will most certainly feel the pain, a disaster that could have been averted with some brains and common sense.
The Ford announcement celebrated extensively by Donald Trump created shock waves among American entrepreneurs by giving the impression there would be a new set of policies in the US federal government to benefit mainly the American worker making good on the Trump slogan Make American Great Again.
That was then.
But, what happened almost six months later, with Donald Trump approaching half a year of his first term as US president?
At the beginning of Summer 2017, with the threat of the Mexican national boycott against Ford still receiving support in the Mexican social media, Ford made another major announcement which essentially wiped off completely the enormous triumph that Donald Trump boasted about in his tweet of January 4 2017 supposedly saving thousands of well paying American jobs. It turns out that Ford will be moving to China all of the production that was originally intended to be moved to Mexico. And this is already an official announcement by Ford. By now, Mark Fields is no longer the CEO of Ford. He was let go by Ford on May 22 2017, almost five months after he took that fateful decision that sent Ford Motor Company into what could very well be its worst public relations scandal in the history of the company in Latin America, and it stands to reason that the reality of it all is starting to sink in the minds of all the other Ford executives who enthusiastically backed Mark Fields in the decision to cancel the construction of the Ford manufacturing plant in Mexico where the same vehicles that were going to be built for US consumption will no longer be built, but will end up being built outside the USA anyway.
Thus, in the end, not a single US manufacturing job was saved by Donald Trump in his dealings with Ford Motor Company asking for a cancellation of the San Luis Potosi project. Those US jobs are gone for good anyway. President Trump was given a big slap in the face by Ford and was left in front of all his followers, especially those in the Rust Belt who counted on him to bring a lot of US manufacturing jobs back, as a fool and a demagogue who is not true to his word, a liar who was willing to say anything to them just to get elected, a buffoon, a caricature of a man of state. And what about his loyal followers, especially those unemployed workers in the Rust Belt who were counting on Donald Trump to make good on his now obsolete promise to bring back a lot of jobs to the area? Well, they were left as throngs of gullible bumbling idiots who are ready and willing to buy snake oil from anyone who convinces them of buying it. They had it coming, and they are getting just what they deserve.
It is a matter of fact that the US federal government now headed by Donald Trump will not reimburse Ford a single cent to cover the loses incurred by Ford in the cancellation of its Mexican plant on which an investment of $1.6 billion dollars was riding. Not a single cent. Adios to all that money! This economic loss was certainly not good news to the stockholders of Ford. If the manufacturing operations that were being planned on Mexico will be opened up in China anyway, this means that the move was inevitable for good economic reasons, economic reasons that were shoved aside when Ford cancelled its San Luis Potosi project. If we dig deep, besides the jobs that will not be returning to the USA there will be loses on other fronts that should have been anticipated by any mediocre businessman who claims to have the wits and savvy of Donald Trump. The San Luis Potosi manufacturing plant was scheduled to have Mexican engineers, accountants, middle managers, quality control supervisors, and all sorts of professional people who, due to the proximity of Monterrey to the USA, would most likely have ended up as good US customers at the US border cities with Monterrey, resulting in a boom for US merchants and businesses. This is a side benefit that has been documented with the presence of maquiladora industries along the US-Mexico border. But with the Ford Focus operations in the Far East, in a country as far away as China, there will be no benefit whatsoever for the US merchants and businesses along the US-Mexico borders. This is an economic hit for which Donald Trump has not yet been made responsible nor accountable.
Donald Trump used the threat of repealing NAFTA to convince the now dethroned Ford CEO Mark Fields to stop the construction of the Ford plant in San Luis Potosi. However, he cannot use the same threat regarding the move of the Ford operations to China (or any other US manufacturing operation) due to the simple fact that the USA has no commercial free trade agreement with China. There is no equivalent of NAFTA in the relations between the USA with China. That was in the works and was nearly completed, but Trump scuttled the trade agreement even before it took effect. Donald Trump could have had such a bargaining chip if he had wanted to, but he himself threw that bargaining chip to the trash can when with a stroke of a pen he unraveled the Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrawing the US from the negotiating process of the TPP, thus keeping his promise as presidential candidate when he vowed during his campaign to withdraw the US from the Pacific trade deal which he argued was very harmful to American workers and manufacturing. Ha! Tell that now to the unemployed American workers in the Rust Belt who are witnessing first hand how the Ford operations that were cancelled in Mexico are being opened up in China. Oddly enough, the US withdrawal from the TPP was actually very good news for China, more than willing to fill in the vacuum left by the USA and take the world leadership away from the Trump administration in the forging of a behemoth trade deal that is expected to benefit several countries, the USA not being one of them.
Ford is not the only US company that will be moving its USA manufacturing operations offshore, regardless of what Donald Trump might say or the threats he comes up with acting like the despicable bully he has always been. Carrier, in spite of the much ballyhooed Trump appearance in person at the main Carrier plant in the USA claiming that he had saved a lot of US manufacturing jobs by convincing Carrier executives with pressure tactics not to move their operations to Mexico, is moving its operations to Mexico anyway. And just a few blocks from Carrier in Indianapolis, Rexnord is doing the same thing, leaving all the Rexnord employees out in the cold after giving most of them their pink slips. Poor devils.
So far, all of the changes announced by Donald Trump as very beneficial to the American worker are turning up to be counterproductive. There is of course the pending issue of withdrawing the USA from NAFTA, a decision that Trump stated he would take after his first 200 days in office. The clock is ticking and there is not a lot of time left, since coming the first days of August 2017 his first 200 days in office will be due, and it is unlikely that Mexico will yield to what amounts to nothing less than a Donald Trump blackmail. Yes, Trump can make good on his promise to abandon NAFTA, but Mexico is not the only country that will be hurt by such a major decision. Most economists now agree that if such a thing does happen, the economic shock will be so severe that the US will most likely end up in very bad shape hitting hard the same American workers who Trump promised to help, and the economic recovery left by the Obama administration may be over with things taking a turn for the worse.
In the meantime, US manufacturers such as Ford, Carrier and Rexnord and many others are not willing to wait and see what Donald Trump will do next regarding NAFTA and other important issues. They seem to be more than fed up with his tweets and threats. Ford has already lost a lot of money by trying to please Trump and has finally learned the hard way that if you try to use appeasement with someone like Trump there will be no reward now or ever on the horizon and the price to be paid for trying to placate a crackpot may end up being outrageous, perhaps big enough to send a company into bankruptcy. And eventually many American workers, especially those Trump loyalists in the Rust Belt who so far have come empty handed, will end up figuring it all up when the blindfold that is now blinding them comes down. And it might be a rude awakening, just as the awakening experienced the German people when the regime that promised them a life of plenty lasting a thousand years ended up with a cyanide capsule and a single bullet fired from the pistol of the lousy coward who deluded them for so long with the promise Make Germany Great Again.
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