A few weeks ago, Donald Trump appeared at a campaign event held at a Pennsylvania farm, at which the Republican issued an unusual threat.
It’s practically unheard of for a presidential candidate to threaten a major American company directly, but that didn’t stop the GOP nominee from saying he was prepared to punish John Deere with a 200% tariff if the agricultural manufacturer moves some of its production to factories in Mexico.
The company had announced plans to shift some production from Iowa to Mexico, so the intimidating warning was rooted, at least in part, in fact.
It was against this backdrop that the former president made a bizarre appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, where he delivered an unexpected boast: His threat, he claimed, worked like a charm.
“Are you ready? John Deere, great company,” Trump said. “They announced about a year ago they’re gonna build big plants outside of the United States. Right? They’re going to build them in Mexico. … I said, ‘If John Deere builds those plants, they’re not selling anything into the United States.’ They just announced yesterday they’re probably not going to build the plants, OK? I kept the jobs here.”
So, good news? I suppose it might be, were it not for the fact that the Republican candidate referenced developments that don’t appear to exist. The Wall Street Journal reported:
Farm equipment maker Deere & Co. said it isn’t abandoning a plan to move some production to Mexico from the U.S., countering former President Donald Trump’s claim Tuesday that he persuaded the company to reconsider. … Deere said after the Trump interview that it didn’t make any announcement about canceling plans to build farm tractor cabs and some construction machinery at plants in Mexico.
As for the GOP candidate’s comments about John Deere’s announcement from Monday, a CNN report noted, “[A] search of news articles and corporate press releases showed nothing about any such John Deere announcement the day prior.”
The report added, “The Trump campaign did not respond to a CNN request for any evidence for the former president’s story.”
As this reporting reached the public, the former president published a related item to his social media platform. “For over a year, I’ve said China is building giant plants in Mexico,” Trump wrote. “Since they heard about the Tariffs, all work has STOPPED on those plants. I saved Michigan autoworkers.”
As best as I can tell, there’s no evidence of China abandoning any manufacturing plans in Mexico. All of which leads to an awkward question about why Trump says stuff like this. To be sure, I’m mindful of the big-picture takeaway — he wants to win an election — but when he made the public boast about John Deere this week, he probably realized that someone would check to see if the claims were true. So, did Trump make a mistake? Did he get confused between what’s real and what he wishes were real? Or did he assume that people would hear his lie, while far fewer people would see the reporting that proves his lie wasn’t true? None of these scenarios is encouraging, but if Trump thought he was telling the truth, then it suggests we’re due for a conversation about whether his relationship with reality is shattered.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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