President Donald Trump again attacked General Motors and its CEO, Mary Barra, over its plans to cut 14,000 jobs.
"I don't like what she did," Trump said during an interview with Fox's Harris Faulkner. "It was nasty. Ohio is going to replace those jobs in two minutes."
GM on Nov. 26 announced it was closing five factories, including Lordstown Assembly in Ohio and Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, along with two U.S. transmission plants and an assembly plant in Ontario. The company also is in the process of cutting 8,000 white-collar workers.
Trump has been highly critical of the move, which undercuts his campaign promises to revive manufacturing jobs in the United States.
"To tell me a couple of weeks before Christmas that she's going to close in Ohio and Michigan, not acceptable to me," Trump said. "General Motors is not going to be treated well."
Trump said the recently signed U.S. trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, which revises NAFTA, "really makes it uncomfortable for people to go out of the country, and I think it will be very uncomfortable for them."
Barra has been steadfast in saying the company must trim workers as it transitions to a tech company seeking to develop electric and self-driving vehicles to seize future revenue as transportation habits change. She traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with Ohio and Michigan lawmakers who have been critical of the cuts.
GM issued this statement Thursday afternoon: "As we previously stated, our focus remains on our employees currently working at the impacted plants in Maryland, Michigan and Ohio. Our announcement was timed to enable interested employees job opportunities that are available at other GM plants beginning in early 2019.
"We continue to produce great vehicles today for our customers while taking steps toward our vision of a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion."
The assembly plants that are closing were running far below their capacity, generally making sedans, which are selling poorly as consumers shift to SUVs and continue to buy record numbers of pickups.
