President Trump Will Keep U.S. Steel American-Owned, American-Made
Recently, both President Biden and Vice President Harris bizarrely flip-flopped on their vow to block Japan’s Nippon Steel from acquiring one of our country’s largest and most vital steel manufacturing companies, U.S. Steel. This September, the Biden-Harris Administration granted an extension on the U.S. Department of Treasury’s national security investigation into the deal, pushing the final determination likely past election day. President Trump, on the other hand, has vowed to block this deal once he gets elected this November, and has not wavered. President Trump understands that foreign countries have vastly different interests than ours when it comes to ensuring the wellbeing of America’s industrial base, and he would never surrender control of any of America’s national security and economic security assets to foreign countries.
U.S. Steel’s pending acquisition by Japan’s Nippon Steel is opposed by rank-and-file steelworkers and the United Steelworkers (USW) union alike, due in large part to major uncertainty about whether American steelworkers would keep their jobs, their pensions, their profit sharing, and their retirement healthcare if the deal were closed, as well as whether U.S. Steel would continue to make steel in America.
The USW has stated that the deal represents a selling out of American steelworkers, with “shocking disregard for our contracts and [U.S. Steel’s] dedicated workforce.” The purchase also poses a clear and present national security threat connected to China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
As the geopolitical intelligence firm Horizon Advisory has reported, “Nippon directly owns significant operations in China” that “share both technology and production expertise with the PRC’s [China’s] industrial base.” And “Nippon’s pervasive integration in China’s steel sector today guarantees that Nippon also supports the literal naval buildup that Beijing’s globally dominant shipbuilding industry has led and that the People’s Liberation Army draws on, increasingly, to project power globally.”
In the presidential election, only President Trump and J.D. Vance have credibility when it comes to putting the United States and American workers first. They will prevent this disastrous takeover – by a foreign firm with nine factories in Communist China – of an iconic pillar of American industry.
President Trump has pledged loud and clear, strongly and directly, “I will stop Japan from buying United States Steel.”
By contrast, as the AP reported just days ago, the federal government under the Biden-Harris administration “appears to be in no hurry to block the deal.”
A report from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is chaired by Harris-Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, would be needed to stop the acquisition, but no report has been filed. This means that the final decision of the CFIUS review will likely be pushed past the November election, meaning that Vice President Harris is likely banking on being able to approve the deal in the end if she wins.
The road to this disastrous pending deal began in August 2023, when Cleveland-based steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs – the nation’s second-largest steel manufacturer by production – made an unsolicited $7.3 billion offer to purchase U.S. Steel, the nation’s third-largest. U.S. Steel rejected the offer but quickly began a sale process that attracted multiple bidders, including Cleveland-Cliffs and Nippon Steel.
Nippon Steel’s all-cash bid of more than $14 billion was chosen by U.S. Steel executives, even though the USW union backed Cleveland-Cliffs as the preferred buyer, and despite arguments that Cleveland-Cliffs’ cash-and-stock offer was worth over $1 billion more than Nippon’s bid.
Senator J.D. Vance, now President Trump’s running mate, publicly opposed the Nippon deal the day it was announced in December 2023. And months before that, he had publicly urged both the CEO and Chairman of U.S. Steel to reject any acquisition bid from a foreign entity, due to the vital role the domestic steel industry serves in defending the security and prosperity of the United States.
Dr. Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade czar and top China hawk, stated in May that “If Trump had been president, Cleveland Cliffs would have consummated its merger with US Steel and created a real American national champion in the world market. The Nippon deal is bad for America.”
Dr. Navarro also wrote in February that if President Trump were in the White House, he would have “called me over to the Oval Office right after the Nippon bid and told me to figure out a way to resurrect the proposed merger of U.S. Steel with U.S. steelmaker Cleveland Cliffs.” He added that a partnership of Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel would be “a marriage made in national security heaven for America, and it’s exactly the kind of deal Mr. Trump loves to get done.”
Alas, unlike President Trump, who put in place historic 25% tariffs on steel imports to protect American steelworkers against the economic aggression of China and other countries, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have shown through their actions that they don’t care about American steelworkers or the American steel industry.
With regard to Tokyo, where Nippon Steel is headquartered, the Biden-Harris administration suspended tariffs on Japan, which has a long history of illegally dumping steel into our country and harming our workers – in exchange for a tariff-rate quota (TRQ), allowing them to sell us up to 1.25 million metric tons of steel annually free of charge.
And during the Biden-Harris administration, repeated exemptions to President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs have been made, resulting in soaring imports. This includes steel and aluminum tariffs on the European Union being suspended by the Biden-Harris administration in 2021, despite the E.U. having been found to threaten U.S. national security with excessive imports into our market. And in June 2022, the United Kingdom, like Japan, was granted a generous TRQ by the Biden-Harris administration, followed by an indefinite exemption to all steel tariffs for Ukraine, on top of the hundreds of billions of foreign aid, funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars, that Biden and Harris have given them. As a result, U.S. imports of iron and steel more than doubled from $19 billion in 2021 to $45 billion by the end of 2022.
Seeing Kamala Harris’ and Joe Biden’s demonstrated disregard for American industry, workers, and national security, Nippon Steel, along with U.S. Steel executives who stand to profit, has been pushing to complete a takeover of U.S. Steel before a second Trump administration.
This summer, Nippon mass-mailed propaganda fliers like this one to Steel Belt residents, urging us to ignore the interests of our steelworker family members, friends, and neighbors, and pressure our elected officials to support a deal that is bad for America.
If Japan taking over U.S. Steel would be such a great deal, why the need for such a hard sell?
To borrow a line from Dr. Navarro’s heroic speech at the Republican National Convention in July, we “politely tell them to go pound sand.”
We’ve seen the blatant abuses and betrayals that can occur when foreigners take control of American industry.
One example comes courtesy of the documentary “American Factory,” which was acquired by Barack Obama’s production company and distributed on Netflix. The documentary shows what happens when a Chinese auto glass maker called Fuyao takes over a factory near Dayton, Ohio that was formerly owned by General Motors.
In the documentary, a Chinese-speaking American floor supervisor hired by the Chinese firm suggests to a Chinese employee, in Mandarin, that American workers’ mouths be duct taped shut to stop them from talking at work.
A highly paid “union avoidance consultant” is hired by the Chinese firm to quash the efforts of American workers to organize a union and stand up for their rights in the workplace.
Chinese employees suggest forcing Americans to work overtime, adding that in China it’s mandatory, and that they don’t care what Americans think.
And in Mandarin, the Chinese president of the firm’s U.S. operations tells Chinese employees, brought in from China to work in the Ohio factory, that they are “better” than American workers and should manage them like donkeys.
American workers despair at their poor treatment.
One worker tells how her friend was fired after being hospitalized for a week.
Another observes that the Chinese have taken complete control over the factory after American managers were demoted.
And another notes that the Chinese managers and workers in Ohio call her a “foreigner” in her own country. She says that American workers want to feel that they are working in America, and not like they’ve left the United States and are in China when they enter their workplace.
President Trump is a proven champion of American workers, and will stop a situation like this from happening at U.S. Steel.
President Trump will block Japan from taking over U.S. Steel, as he continues to stand up for American workers throughout the nation and across industries. He will also invoke universal baseline tariffs to create an additional several thousand dollars in wealth for American families annually, create over 1 million manufacturing jobs, and attract billions of dollars in domestic investment to secure our defense industrial base. A vote for President Trump and J.D. Vance in 2024 is a vote to keep U.S. Steel American-owned and American-made.
Joanna Wischer was a senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under President Trump where she worked on advancing the Buy American, Hire American initiative. She currently serves as a policy analyst on the Donald Trump for President 2024 campaign. All opinions expressed on Substack are her own and not affiliated with the campaign.
Adam Molon is a guest columnist for Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America, a China scholar, and the author of NewSentry.
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