President Donald Trump celebrated a massive economic achievement for America and Pennsylvania on Friday in Pittsburgh, at a U.S. Steel plant, just after announcing an upcoming deal with Japan that is poised to benefit both countries.
“The best and strongest steel on Earth will forever be made in America and made in Pennsylvania,” Trump said, drawing applause from a crowd of steel workers decked out in safety helmets and orange jackets at the Mon Valley Works Irvin Plant in West Mifflin.
“We’re here today to celebrate a blockbuster agreement that will ensure this storied American company stays an American company,” Trump remarked,
He lauded Japan as a “great partner” and praised the country as being a “tremendous friend of mine during my years as president” during his first term.
“We were blessed, and you’re going to be blessed,” he added, noting that his second term is even better than it would have been had the 2020 presidential election not been “rigged.”
“For generations, the name United States Steel was synonymous with greatness and now it will again by synonymous with greatness,” he said.
The president announced last week that U.S. Steel would remain in America, heralding what he called a “planned partnership between United States Steel and Nippon Steel,” which he said would result in 70,000 new jobs and a $14 billion economic boost.
“This is the largest Investment in the History of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” he wrote in his statement.
On Friday, Trump projected confidence in the United States’ momentum, highlighting the deal as a “big deal.”
“We had a nation that was cold as ice,” Trump said, referring to the Biden administration, “and now we have the hottest, most talked about nation anywhere in the world.”
He also championed the history of steel manufacturing in America. “For more than 124 years, the men and women of U.S. Steel have poured the molten metal and forged the tempered beams that built America’s railroads, bridged mighty rivers, and raise dup tower skyscrapers,” he said.
Trump slammed Washingtonian “betrayals and incompetence and stupidity and corruption” that led to the decline of steel jobs and the destruction of iron and steel mills under other administrations.
“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” he remarked, referring to steel production, as “above all, a matter of national security.”
President Trump also announced that next week, tariffs on steel imports would rise to 50 percent – doubling the current 25 percent tariffs. “[This] will even further secure the steel industry in the United States, nobody’s going to get around that,” he said.
