When I look at the torrent of executive orders and tariffs that President Donald Trump has issued since taking office, I fear that I'm watching the real-life version of that Certified Financial Planner Board commercial that tries to show why expertise really does matter. In the commercial, a surgeon comes into a hospital room and meets his patient. First, the doctor calls her Brenda and she says, "It's Carol." Then the doctor asks, "So which leg are we operating on?" And she says, "You mean arm." The doctor then waves off her obvious concern, saying, "It's all connected." Now totally terrified, the patient finally asks the surgeon: "Are you sure you're an orthopedist?" The doctor responds: "Actually, I'm a Sagittarius." Budget with ETTax calculator Pardon my skepticism, but I have serious doubts about the degree to which Trump and his team of budget surgeons have actually studied not just how to implement all the cuts and tariffs and freezes and dismissals they've rushed to make but also the long-term effects they will have on the totality of American governance, trade and investment. Whose work are we watching here? That of a surgeon or a Sagittarius? Are we seeing the unfolding of a plan that has been stress-tested and modeled for months, with all the implications fully understood? Or are we seeing the unfolding of a paper napkin from the Mar-a-Lago bar with some half-baked ideas sketched out and then chaotic seat-of-pants wrangling between Trump and his aides and lobbyists over which industries will be hit and which will be spared? I'm going with the napkin. It's hard for me to say it better than the normally pro-Trump Wall Street Journal's editorial titled "The Dumbest Trade War in History," which says "Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason." 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And they have to make those bets while competing against China, where the government wakes up every day and asks manufacturers: How can I help you? And: Let's take the long view together on how we win globally. To understand that better, I visited Ford Motor headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, last week to see how it is competing with China's EV juggernaut. Nearly half of new car sales in China are battery-electric or plug-in hybrid electric cars, and its companies control about 60% of the global market for these models. The latter is due in large part to the fact that China makes the best car batteries in the world, and any U.S. automaker that wants to be competitive in the EV business today needs battery technology transfer from China. Let me repeat that a little slower: To be globally competitive in the cars of the future, U.S. automakers need battery tech transfer from China. We are talking about a total reversal from 25 years ago, when China needed tech transfer from General Motors and Ford to build internationally competitive cars. Here is the story in a nutshell. The car industry is totally global today. A company like Ford has to balance the desire of its customers for traditional combustion engines, plug-in hybrids or all-electric vehicles with increasing capabilities for autonomous driving. But it has to do so in a world in which China has made a massive bet on EVs and is perfectly happy to ignore the U.S. market for now and beat Ford and other U.S. manufacturers in Brazil, Indonesia, Europe and Africa. So if Ford ignores the EV business entirely, it surrenders the rest of the world to China -- and risks waking up one day in five years to find most of the world running on China's EVs -- and it's just left with America. To forestall such a disaster, Ford, like other U.S. automakers, took advantage of incentives offered by the Biden administration to build major EV and battery factories in the U.S. Ford is now near completion of a 1.8-million-square-foot BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan, which is slated to begin production of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in 2026 for Ford's EVs. The facility is wholly owned by Ford -- a roughly $2 billion investment -- but the batteries it will produce for its EVs are based on LFP technology licensed from Chinese battery giant CATL. It is expected to create about 1,700 jobs. (It would have been more, but there has been a slowdown in EV sales in the U.S. because of insufficient charging stations.) The Marshall factory was originally slated to be built in Mexico, but because of President Joe Biden's EV incentives, Ford moved it to Michigan -- just how the system was supposed to work: Give our auto companies production and consumer tax credits until the industry gets up to scale and can survive on its own. Exactly what China does. But Ford needed a Chinese battery partner. No American battery manufacturer right now can match CATL batteries, which charge faster and travel farther. "Cars today are becoming digital transportation devices," Ford CEO Jim Farley said. And China is 10 years ahead in making the batteries for those cars and creating that all-around digital driving experience, he said. "So, the way we compete with them is to get access to their IP just the way they needed ours 20 years ago, and then use our innovative ecosystem and American ingenuity and our great scale and our intimacy with the customer to beat them globally. It will be one of the most important races to save our industrial economy." To that end, Ford is also preparing to begin hiring for the $5.6 billion, 3,600-acre BlueOval City factory it is completing in the western Tennessee town of Stanton, which includes a new EV and battery manufacturing facility and a supplier park, and will also offer educational programs for "technical training, postsecondary education and K-12 programs, including work-based learning experiences, with an emphasis on STEM" in order "to prepare the next generation to build the electric vehicle future in America." Sounds like a pretty good plan. But then Trump replaced Biden. Shortly after being sworn in -- and with no prior consultation with Ford, or apparently any other U.S. automakers -- Trump revoked Biden's 2021 executive order that sought to ensure that half of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2030 were electric. Trump also ordered a halt to the distribution of unspent government funds for vehicle charging stations from a $5 billion fund, and said that he was considering eliminating the EV tax credits -- the foundation on which Ford made the massive bet on these two new factories. It is precisely the kind of shortsighted, stop-start thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. My fellow Americans, do you know why we are so behind China today on EV batteries? Two reasons. First, China graduates so many more electrical and automobile engineers than we do. But second, U.S. innovators invented CATL's breakthrough LFP battery technology for EVs -- but gave it away to China. Think I am making this up? Here's the short story from Bloomberg: "In the mid-1990s, a compound called lithium iron phosphate (LFP), the primary battery chemistry now used by CATL and most battery companies in China, was discovered by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and commercialized a few years later by the startup A123 Systems LLC," which in 2009 was awarded hundreds of millions of dollars by the Obama administration, hoping it would ignite a U.S. electric car industry. But the demand just was not there yet. So in 2013, the story added, "China's then-biggest auto parts company purchased A123 out of bankruptcy" and a decade later China controlled "83% of all lithium-ion battery manufacturing." The U.S. "is now at least a decade behind China when it comes to battery manufacturing, in terms of both the necessary technology and the capacity, industry experts say." Beijing understood that it could never win the game of internal combustion engines, so it leapfrogged to "the software-defined vehicle" that just keeps improving with digital updates. That is the EV, and its cornerstone technology is the battery. The Chinese don't call these cars green. They call them smart. The American way is: invent, ignore, leap forward with one administration and then leap backward with the next. It's flat-out crazy. Just as the adjacencies of steel, coal, combustion engines and manual labor created a multiplier effect in the 20th century, the ecosystem of EVs, AI, robotics, advanced batteries, clean tech, autonomous driving systems and digitized mind labor will do the same in the 21st century. If America absents itself from any part of that ecosystem, it will be left behind. Tariffs only buy a country time so its companies can make the necessary changes to compete without walls. Trump's strategy is to hurt our car companies' exports with a tariff wall and then shoot them in the back behind the wall. If Trump had any common sense, he'd say: I am for all of the above -- gasoline cars, plug-in hybrids, all-electric EVs and autonomous cars -- all I care is that you buy American. And to make sure that our great American EV makers can get to scale, I am going to use the money from tariffs to do what the silly progressive Democrats refused to do: pass a bill to build a national transmission grid and network of fast-charging stations, so anyone who buys an EV will never have to worry about long-distance travel. Now, that's how to make America great. Anything less is just faking it.
