Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, known for owning car dealerships across Ohio, said General Motors (GM) had decided to close Rust Belt factories while expanding production overseas. As a result, sales of Chinese-made cars have been discontinued.
At the end of 2018, GM CEO Mary Barra said: announced The closure of two factories in Detroit, Michigan and Lordstown Congress in Lordstown, Ohio led to the layoffs of thousands of American autoworkers in the region and thousands more in supporting industries.
The following year, Moreno said he took a stand against Barra’s mass layoffs. Among dozens of other dealerships in the state, Mr. Moreno owned a Buick GMC dealership in Beachwood, Ohio, where he sold Chinese-made Buick Envisions.
Moreno’s dealership had been selling the Buick Envision since 2014. After hearing about GM’s job cuts in the U.S. due to expanded production overseas, Moreno canceled all sales of the Envision and wrote a letter to GM executives asking them not to send any more crossover SUVs to their dealerships. He said he wrote
“I used to run a Buick dealership, and people who buy Buicks probably think they’re buying a Buick because they want an American-made car. These are the people I met in the showroom.” Moreno said at the 2021 Candidate Forum, Spectrum News report:
When Buick closed its Michigan factory, opened one in China, and shipped those cars to the United States; I sent a letter to General Motors – please do not ship, the car is not on my property. I received a letter from General Motors that wasn’t a very good response. All kinds of threats. I would never be a GM dealer again, I would never do anything like this again – and I stood my ground and didn’t sell the car. [Emphasis added]
An April 2019 email confirms that Moreno instructed a sales manager to ensure that the Beachwood Buick GMC dealership no longer sells Chinese-made vehicles.
“We do not sell Envision,” Moreno wrote in an email published on Spectrum News. A spokesperson for Moreno’s Senate campaign also said the dealership used to sell Envisions, but all sales ceased in 2019 amid GM’s mass layoffs in Ohio and Michigan. Admitted.
Similarly, the former general manager of the Beachwood dealership told Spectrum News in a statement:The retailer was instructed to stop selling the product. [Envisions] immediately. “
However, Spectrum News used recent statements by Moreno to suggest that the Senate candidate had previously claimed he had never sold an Envision at a dealership, a suggestion denied by his campaign. It was done.
On July 16, 2019, 1,112 local United Auto Workers (UAW) employees and supporters protested at General Motors’ now-closed Lordstown Assembly Plant. (Jeff Kowalski/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
For example, in February, Moreno told a local radio host, “Buick Envisions are made in China. “It was,” he said. He said he has written to GM executives asking them to stop sending the cars.
Spectrum News’ misleading claims are being used as campaign advertising by Moreno’s opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), in this year’s fierce Senate race. Importantly, Moreno has the support of former President Donald Trump and is essential to making a populist pitch to the state’s autoworkers.
Brown said in a video message Thursday. Said He supports a “total ban on Chinese electric vehicles in the United States.”
“I’m calling for a total ban on Chinese-made electric cars,” Brown said in a video posted on Twitter. “…I want those cars to be made in America by American workers. That’s all.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
