President Donald Trump lent his office to Japanese automaker Toyota on Monday, saying the company’s announcement of a $1.33 billion investment in its Georgetown, Kentucky plant was evidence that confidence in the economic climate “has greatly improved under my administration.”
“Toyota’s decision to invest $1.3 billion in their Kentucky plant is further evidence that manufacturers are now confident that the economic climate has greatly improved under my administration and echoes the recent National Association of Manufacturers’ 2017 Outlook Survey showing that 93% of manufacturers are now optimistic, which is an increase of 37% from just a few months ago,” Trump said in a company press release.
The White House has not responded to TPM’s questions about the statement.
“We’re certainly pleased to get that comment from the President on this, recognizing the significance of this investment,” plant president Wil James told Bloomberg TV Monday.
The investment in the plant is “part of Toyota’s plan to invest $10 billion dollars in the U.S. over the next five years,” Toyota Motor North America CEO Jim Lentz said in the same press release.
James told Bloomberg that, while the $1.33 billion was the largest single investment in the plant’s history, “we’ll do basically just shy of $100 million every year just as a normal course of business.”
“So when you think back over the last five years, it’s about $1.8 billion or so in investment in our plant in Georgetown alone,” he continued.
The announcement also included praise from Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) and the state’s senior U.S. senator, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
In early March, a statement from Trump praising ExxonMobil’s announcement of the continuation of a multi-billion dollar initiative to expand in the Gulf of Mexico cribbed a paragraph from Exxon’s statement on the expansion nearly word-for-word.
