Inside the GOP pressure campaign to flip Trump on Nippon Steel

Politico

5 days ago

President Donald Trump's decision to approve the foreign sale of U.S. Steel, an American manufacturing icon, came after months of sustained pressure from a group of Rust Belt Republicans.
Advocates for the deal say the lobbying effort was crucial to the president's reversal of his campaign pledge to block the nearly $15 billion sale, which he will formalize in a speech at the company's Pittsburgh headquarters on Friday.
'That should have been a no-brainer, frankly, and lawmakers in Trump's corner helped him see that,' said one former Republican official, who is in favor of the deal and familiar with the discussions at the White House.
The group of roughly a half-dozen GOP lawmakers from Pennsylvania and other states with U.S. Steel operations launched a series of meetings and group text chains shortly after Trump's November election victory, developing a plan to pitch his top economic officials on the merits of the sale, according to six people familiar with those discussions, granted anonymity to reveal private details of conversations. Eventually, and somewhat unexpectedly, they got an audience with the president himself.
The message the group delivered: If the incoming president did not reverse his predecessor, Joe Biden's, decision to block Nippon Steel's purchase of the country's second-largest steel producer, it would lead to major manufacturing job losses in Pennsylvania and other states in the steel production supply chain. Rather than abandoning the deal, as Trump promised to do during the 2024 campaign, they called on administration officials, including U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to push Nippon Steel to increase its promise of billions in investments in the company's steel infrastructure in exchange for approval.
The president echoed many of those arguments last week in a Truth Social post, declaring his support for 'a planned partnership between United States Steel and Nippon Steel, which will create at least 70,000 jobs, and add $14 Billion Dollars to the U.S. Economy.' He added: 'This is the largest Investment in the History of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.'
The about-face, after months of hinting that he was softening on the proposed sale, comes at a time when Trump is threatening waves of new tariffs to try to force foreign companies to manufacture their products in the U.S. And it's a reminder that, as much as the president has embraced certain ideological positions — including the protectionist agenda of labor unions who vociferously opposed Nippon's purchase — he is still primarily a transactional policymaker, something the GOP lawmakers seized on.
'This is really about just a good deal for the state of Pennsylvania,' said one person familiar with negotiations. 'Steel is very important to this administration, and I think once the president understood, and negotiated a better deal where the U.S. national security risks were placated, he felt comfortable with it.'
A White House official declined to say how much the lawmakers influenced Trump's decision but said, 'The president certainly appreciates the insight from lawmakers and members of Congress whom he respects.'
Trump first weighed in on Nippon's proposed purchase of U.S. Steel, announced in December 2023, after a meeting with the Teamsters Union in Washington the following month, promising to 'block it instantaneously.' He reiterated his opposition to the sale in a social media post as recently as January 2025, though it didn't dampen hope among supporters of the deal that Trump would ultimately be more open to it than Biden, a longtime labor union ally, had been.
That was certainly the case among the group of lawmakers who lobbied for the deal. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), whose district is situated just to the north of U.S. Steel's Pittsburgh headquarters, and fellow Pennsylvania Republicans Sen. Dave McCormick and Rep Dan Meuser along with Reps. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), Andy Barr (R-Ky.) and Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), co-chair of the Steel Caucus, were generally in favor of some version of a deal since long before the president publicly softened his position. But few dared to challenge the president's opposition publicly, particularly during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign.
'We're realists on the timing. That doesn't mean we were quiet, it means that things were actually happening faster,' said one staffer involved in the effort.
As the new Trump administration got up and running, the lawmakers and their teams initially discussed trying to plead their case to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or possibly Vice President JD Vance. But more recent discussions focused more narrowly on changing Trump's perspective.
The group was pleasantly surprised by the president's remarks in February that suggested he would be open to Nippon Steel taking a minority stake in the company, two people close to the talks said. A group of lawmakers gathered in the Oval Office as recently as May 22, where they worked to bat back arguments from some critics who said that Japan was seeking rogue influence through the purchase. Japan, after all, is a strong ally of the United States, the lawmakers argued to the president.
Pennsylvania's lawmakers focused their appeals on the risk of thousands of job losses, pointing in particular to comments U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt made in September 2024, when he told The Wall Street Journal that if Nippon's bid fell through, the company would likely have to close steel mills in their state and Indiana, which employ thousands of workers. Burritt said the nearly $3 billion that Nippon Steel pledged to invest in the company's mills was crucial to maintain them.
That warning didn't move Biden, who blocked the deal in one of his last acts before leaving office, after an interagency review identified certain national security risks associated with the deal, though it did not come to a conclusion on whether to reject it. Backers of the deal, as well as international business experts, complained that the review was highly politicized, however, after the sale became a lightning rod in the 2024 election campaign, particularly in the Rust Belt. The United Steelworkers union, which wields particular influence among blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, strongly opposed the deal.
The union maintained that stance in a May 28 statement questioning the terms of the new 'partnership' Trump hinted at in his Truth Social post. 'Our core concerns about Nippon Steel — a foreign-owned corporation with a documented history of violating U.S. trade laws — remain as strong and valid today as ever, and that is so whether U.S. Steel and Nippon adhere to the same deal that they have pursued since December 2023 or whether they tweak the terms to satisfy concerns in Washington,' the statement read.
But as a second corporate lobbyist in favor of the Nippon deal observed, 'The politics of the election is over and the reality is setting in. We can't make the kind of specialty steel that is needed, we don't have the capacity.'
After his inauguration, Trump began changing his tone on the sale, telling reporters he 'wouldn't mind greatly,' if Nippon Steel took a minority stake in the company. In April, Trump directed the interagency committee, known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, to take a fresh look at Nippon's bid. The new review was due to the president on May 21.
After months of discussions, Nippon offered to raise its investment in U.S. Steel's infrastructure to $14 billion, Reuters reported last week. That and the promise that U.S. Steel will remain based in the United States, as well as American veto power over various company decisions, nudged Trump to greenlight the purchase.
'That's been the stumbling block — are we turning over U.S. Steel to the Japanese. And the answer to that problem is, a negotiated agreement that will have Americans having a seat at the table,' said Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser to Trump, who has long supported some version of Nippon's acquisition.
Nippon Steel and the White House declined to confirm details of the agreement. But the White House official said Trump will reveal more details about the plan Friday, when he is slated to deliver a major economic speech in Pittsburgh.
'This is something he talked about on the campaign and has continued to work on,' the official said. 'It's a very big deal for Pennsylvania, and for the steel industry and for the working class.'
Daniel Desrochers contributed to this report.