President Trump Talks Jobs With Heads of Ford, General Motors, and Fiat Chrysler

POTUS vows to lower taxes and regulations and to hold back potentially restrictive environmental laws.

byAaron Brown|
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President Donald Trump spoke to a handful of Detroit-based automotive industry leaders over breakfast Tuesday morning as part of his push to create more jobs in America.

Trump began the meeting by speaking about how he wanted more auto plants in America. In attendance were GM Executive Vice President Craig Glidden, GM CEO Mary Barra, Ford Vice President of Government and Community Relations Ziad Ojakli, Ford CEO Mark Fields, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne. With Trump were his Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks, Chief Strategist Mike Bannon, Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and the vice president's Chief of Staff Josh Pitcock, a Bloomberg reporter says

"We're bringing manufacturing back to the United States—bigly—we're reducing taxes very substantially and we're reducing unnecessary regulations," said Trump to reporters before the meeting commenced. "We want regulations but we want real regulations that mean something." 
The Tuesday meeting was the first time since 2011 that the CEOs of Ford, Fiat Chrysler, and GM sat down with a U.S. president, Reuters reports. Six years ago, President Barack Obama spoke to the auto industry leaders about raising fuel efficiency standards by 2025. 

Trump sat down with other big business leaders Monday—including Fields and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—to also speak about growing the number of American jobs. In that meeting, the President said he hopes to cut government regulations that might be holding those big companies back by 75 percent or "maybe more."

"I come out [of the meeting] with a lot of confidence that the president is very very serious on making sure that the U.S. economy is going to be strong and have policies—tax, regulatory or trade– to drive that, and I think that encourages all of us, as CEOs, as we make decisions going forward," said Fields to reporters at the White House after Monday's gathering. "It was a very, very positive meeting."

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