SHEPARD SMITH (HOST): The president-elect is taking credit for stopping the Ford car company from moving one of its American factories to Mexico, but there's a problem. He did do not that.
Ford executives were never planning to shut down the plant in Louisville, never. The president-elect tweeted, nonetheless, last night, “Just got a call from my friend, Bill Ford, chairman of Ford, who advised me that he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky. No Mexico.” He continued, “I worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky. I owed it to the great state of Kentucky for their confidence in me.”
Associated Press and others report that auto giant was never going to transfer. It was actually going to transfer production of just one vehicle, the Lincoln MKC, so it could boost production of a more popular model, the Ford Escape, and company representatives apparently said there were no plans to cut even one single U.S. job.
In an e-mail to the A.P., a Ford spokeswoman would not confirm that executive -- when executives made the decision, or whether president Trump -- president-elect Trump influenced the decision, but wrote “We are encouraged that president-elect Trump and the new congress will pursue policies that will improve U.S. competitiveness to make it possible to keep production of this vehicle here in the United States.”
John Busse is now the associate editor for the Wall Street Journal, and here with us on the deck. He didn't actually do what he said he did.
JOHN BOSSE: Yeah. John Stoll and Christina Rogers of our Detroit bureau have a great sort of play by play of what actually happened, so in our website, on WSJ.com.
And you're right, the number of jobs that that plant employs before this announcement, and after this announcement are unchanged. As you point out, all they were going to do is that they had already announced to the UAW they were going to move production of that Lincoln Crossover SUV to -- to Mexico, so they could boost production of the Ford Escape, which is also made at that plant.
That's all that was going to happen. So, no jobs were going to be lost, no jobs were going to be gained, the plant was going operate as usual.
