After General Motors ( GM ) stopped selling cars made in China, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, decided to expand production in the Rust Belt while expanding production overseas. The automaker is known for his car dealerships throughout Ohio.
In late 2018, GM CEO Mary Barra announced the closure of two crops in Detroit, Michigan, as well as , Lordstown Assembly in Lordstown, Ohio — techniques that led to the layoffs , of thousands of American automobile employees in the region and dozens more in supporting business.
The next year, Moreno said he took a stand against Barra’s large cuts. Amid lots of different retailers in the position, Moreno owned , a Buick GMC factory in Beachwood, Ohio, that had been selling the China- made Buick Envision.
Moreno’s factory, since 2014, had sold the Buick Envision. Moreno claimed he stopped all income of the Envision and sent a notice to GM executives telling them not to take any more of the cross SUVs to his shop after learning about GM’s layoffs in the United States while expanding manufacturing elsewhere.
” All of you who buy Buicks probably think you buy them because you want an American-made car because I owned a Buick dealership. Those are the people I met in my showroom”, Moreno said at a candidate forum in 2021, Spectrum News reports:
I wrote to General Motors saying,” Do n’t ship me one; that car wo n’t be on my lot when Buick shut down the factory in Michigan to open a factory in China and ship those cars to the United States.” General Motors emailed me a terrible letter back. All kinds of threats. You’ll never be a second GM dealer, and you’ll never do this, so I stood up for what I had to say and did n’t sell that car. ]Emphasis added]
Emails from April 2019 confirm that Moreno had informed sales representatives that the Beachwood Buick GMC dealership no longer offered the China-made vehicle.
” We do n’t sell the Envisions”, Moreno wrote in an email published in Spectrum News. In addition, a spokeswoman for Moreno’s senate campaign acknowledged that despite the dealership selling the Envision, all sales were suspended in 2019 as a result of GM’s widespread layoffs in Ohio and Michigan.
Additionally, a former Beachwood dealership general manager said in a statement that” Bernie directed the dealership to stop selling [Envisions ] immediately following the closure of the General Motors Lordstown Plant in March 2019 which could have been used to move manufacturing of vehicles back to the U.S.
However, according to Moreno’s most recent statements, Spectrum News suggested that the senator had previously refuted his campaign’s claim that he had never sold the Envision at his dealership.
United Auto Workers ( UAW ) Local 1112 employees and supporters, from the now closed General Motors Co. Lordstown assembly plant protest on July 16, 2019. ( Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images )
In February, for example, Moreno told a local radio host:” The Buick Envision was made in China, I told General Motors I would n’t sell one of them, do n’t even ship it to me”, referring to the letter he said he wrote to GM executives telling them to stop sending him the vehicles.
In this year’s tumultuous Senate race, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Moreno’s opponent, is using the misleading claim from Spectrum News as a campaign pitch. Importantly, Moreno has received former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, vital to making a populist pitch to the state’s auto workers.
Brown endorsed a” complete ban on Chinese electric vehicles in America,” according to a video message sent on Thursday.
” I’m calling for a total ban on Chinese electric vehicles”, Brown says in the video posted to Twitter,” … all I want is those cars to be made in America by American workers”.
For Breitbart News, John Binder is a reporter. Email him at , [email protected].  , Follow him on Twitter , here.  ,
