Ford Will Keep Battery Factory Even if Republicans Axe Tax Break
Ford Motor said on Monday that it was committed to completing and opening a battery plant in Michigan, even if Congress and President Trump make the project ineligible for tax incentives.
The $3 billion plant, in Marshall, Mich., 100 miles west of Detroit, uses battery and manufacturing technology that Ford licensed from a Chinese company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., known as CATL.
Ford decided to build the factory two years ago under the expectation that a portion of the cost would be offset by federal tax credits provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s signature energy and climate change legislation.
But Republicans in Congress are working on a policy bill that could bar federal support for battery plants that use Chinese technology or materials. Mr. Trump has supported that effort and sharply criticized Democratic efforts to encourage the use and production of electric vehicles.
At a tour of the factory on Monday, Lisa Drake, Ford's vice president for technology platform programs and E.V. systems, said the company would move ahead even if such restrictions were signed into law.
'We don't want to back off on this facility,' Ms. Drake told reporters. 'When we invest, we stick behind our investments. Ford is a company that will weather the storm until we get there.'
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Atlantic
31 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Trump Wants to ‘Make Iran Great Again'
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Donald Trump raised the idea of toppling Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei yesterday, it wasn't just the idea that was surprising. It was the particular phrase he used to describe it. 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!' he posted yesterday on Truth Social. The phrase became toxic for a reason. Two years ago, an essay in the Claremont Review of Books noted that regime change entered the popular lexicon in 'the early days of the 9/11 wars, when the Bush (43) Administration argued that the security of America and of the entire world depended not merely on defeating hostile countries militarily but on changing their governments into ones more inherently peaceable and favorable to our interests.' Of course, regimes change all the time, but regime change came to mean 'external, forcible transformation from 'authoritarianism' or 'dictatorship.'' This sounds very much like what Trump is discussing. Having switched from discouraging Israeli military strikes against Iran to joining them, he appears to now be toying with broader ambitions. (Trump offers few endorsements stronger than calling something 'politically incorrect.') But the writer of the Claremont Review essay, a prominent right-wing intellectual, warned about such projects. 'We know how that worked out. Regimes were changed all right, but not into democracies,' he wrote. 'And some of them—e.g., the one in Afghanistan—20 years later changed back to the same regime American firepower had overthrown in 2001.' That writer was Michael Anton. Today he is the director of the policy-planning staff at the State Department (a bit of an oxymoron in this administration), and in April, the White House named him to lead the U.S. delegation at technical talks with Iran on a nuclear deal—negotiations that are presumably irrelevant for the time being. Trump's abrupt shift has thrown the MAGA right into acrimony. In truth, the president has never been a pacificist, as I wrote last week. During the 2016 GOP primary, Trump cannily grasped public anger at the Iraq War and turned it against his rivals. Thinkers such as Anton and politicians such as Vice President J. D. Vance then tried to retrofit a more complete ideology of retrenchment and restraint onto it, but Trump is an improviser, not an ideologue. No one should have been too surprised by the president's order to bomb. Still, his rhetorical embrace of regime change was stunning even to those who never bought into his identity as a dove, and certainly to some of his aides. Perhaps Anton was not surprised to see his view so cavalierly discarded; after all, he once likened backing Trump to playing Russian roulette. But Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were unprepared for the change in rhetoric. Rubio solemnly told Fox Business that the U.S. is not at war with the country it just dropped hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordnance on. Vance, on Meet the Press, insisted, 'Our view has been very clear that we don't want a regime change. We do not want to protract this or build this out any more than it's already been built out.' A few hours later, Trump contradicted him directly, in what would have been embarrassing for someone still capable of the emotion. Vance's views on foreign policy are deeply shaped by the Iraq War, in which he served. Now his boss is at risk of speedwalking that conflict one country to the east. The Iraq War was the product of months of preparation by the George W. Bush administration: military mobilization, avid though unsuccessful attempts to rally international support, an extended period of manufacturing consensus in Congress and in the American public. Yet despite that work, and as even proponents of regime change in Iran acknowledge, the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War was a disaster, perhaps the worst American foreign-policy blunder in history. The U.S. government had good war plans for getting rid of Saddam Hussein's regime but had not effectively thought through what would happen after that. Trump has done even less of that thinking, and leads a nation far more politically divided and warier of foreign intervention. Americans have long viewed Iran negatively: A Fox News poll before this weekend's airstrikes found that roughly three-quarters of them view Iran as a 'real security threat.' Still, another poll earlier this month found that most don't want the U.S. to get involved in armed conflict there. A Pew Research Center poll in May even found that slightly more Americans think that the United States is its own 'greatest threat' than that Iran is. Trump's flippant transformation of 'Make America great again' into 'Make Iran great again' exemplifies the hubris of the Iraq War project that he had promised to leave behind. Just as U.S. officials claimed that Iraq could be easily and quickly converted into an American-style democracy, Trump wants to export his catchphrase to Iran, where the implementation would be even hazier than it is here. Iran is a country of some 90 million people, not a dollhouse to be rearranged. Can regime change work? The answer depends on how success is defined. In 1973, for example, the U.S. backed a coup in Chile, toppling the leftist leader Salvador Allende. It worked: Allende was killed and replaced by Augusto Pinochet, who created a stable, market-based, U.S.-friendly Chilean government. But doing that involved horrifying repression and the killing and disappearances of thousands of critics, leaving a black mark on the U.S. record. In another case of regime change, the U.S. government helped topple Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. This, too, was an immediate success. Mossadegh was removed, and the Washington-friendly Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored to power. But the legacy of the moment stretched on much longer. The shah was also brutally repressive, and Iranians remembered the 1953 coup bitterly. In 1979, a revolution swept Iran, deposing Pahlavi and installing a virulently anti-American government. That regime still rules in Tehran—for now, at least. 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Fox News
34 minutes ago
- Fox News
Charlamagne says Dems 'sound like hypocrites' for demanding congressional approval for strikes
Radio host Charlamagne tha God called out Democrats on Monday for their outrage about President Donald Trump launching strikes on Iran without congressional authority, saying they turned a blind eye when Democrats recently did the same. The U.S. launched a surprise strike using B-2 stealth bombers on Iran's Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities on Saturday. "All three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction," Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine said during a briefing at the Pentagon on Sunday morning. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., called out Trump for the strikes during a Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," arguing the head of state should have begun the process by first "coming to Congress and asking for authorization to do this." He continued, "That's the constitutional approach to this. He could have talked to us about what the goal is and what the plan is ahead of time. And we could have had a discussion about it." Charlamagne agreed, but argued Democrats like Kelly should look in the mirror. "Morgyn, this is one of those times when politicians sound like hypocrites, because Mark Kelly is right, the president should get congressional approval," he said about the national war powers debate. "But there have been a bunch of presidents who have ordered strikes without congressional approval." "Barack Obama did it against Libya. Joe Biden ordered strikes in Iraq and Syria without congressional approval. Bill Clinton did it with - 'Kosovo' I think you pronounce it?" he recalled. "So presidents ordering military action without congressional approval has become pretty routine." Co-host Morgyn V. Wood noted that this issue is now being cited for possible impeachment. "So why didn't it lead to an impeachment for everybody else? Like, when Barack Obama did it, when Biden did it, when Clinton did it?" Charlamagne asked. Wood said that there have been calls for impeachment over presidents' military actions without congressional approval before, but Charlamagne was not persuaded. "I don't even remember hearing about it during the Joe Biden administration," Charlamagne said. "I guess that's just because of the way Trump has been moving," co-host DJ Envy said. "But we didn't hear about it when Obama did it. We didn't hear about it when Biden did it." "I do remember when Obama did it," Charlamagne said. "When Obama did it, I do remember, you know, people in Congress saying he needed congressional approval, and they were making it a thing. I don't remember the Biden thing at all. I don't remember that even making a headline." After Wood recalled the widespread outrage over Biden's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Charlamagne said he recalled Biden's lack of accountability for military missteps after an NBC News piece headlined, "Presidents' ordering military action without Congress' approval has become routine."
Associated Press
37 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Texas governor calls for special session after vetoing a bill to ban THC-infused goods
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