Executives with General Motors (GM) are working hard to curry favor with President Donald Trump’s administration, even as some of the automaker’s initiatives — including trying to preserve Electric Vehicle (EV) mandates and subsidies — do not align with the president’s agenda.
When Trump first announced tariffs on imported cars to the United States market, GM CEO Mary Barra jumped to seemingly support the tariffs despite the automaker importing millions of foreign-made cars every few years.
“The Detroit stalwart imported more cars into the U.S. last year than any other automaker, even Japan’s Toyota,” Bloomberg UK reported last month:
Nearly half of the vehicles GM sold in the U.S. last year — 1.23 million autos — were built abroad, according to researcher GlobalData. That includes many of its most affordable models, like the Korean-made Chevrolet Trax and Buick Envista SUVs, whose low prices depend on cheap production. [Emphasis added]
Similarly, GM is the largest auto manufacturer in Mexico, having produced nearly 890,000 vehicles south of the border in 2024. This was a 23-percent increase in vehicle production in Mexico for GM compared to 2023.
“We’re trying to make changes to pay less tariffs because we’re strengthening our U.S. manufacturing,” Barra said at the Wall Street Journal‘s Future of Everything conference in New York City last month:
There’s decisions we can make when we look at the entire equation … we have the capacity available in some of the assembly plants and engine plants that we have in this country that we’re going to continue to utilize.
A GM source underscored Barra’s support for some of Trump’s tariffs, telling Breitbart News that the automaker wants fairer trading rules for American manufacturing and exporting.
In recent months, GM’s lobbying arm has been working hard to convince House and Senate Republicans to slip former President Joe Biden’s Electric Vehicle (EV) consumer tax subsidies into Trump’s spending package known as the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
Biden’s EV tax credits sought to put sales into overdrive, though it has largely failed while costing billions for American taxpayers. Despite the lack of EV sales, Barra has staked GM’s future on EVs, vowing that the automaker will be fully electric by 2035.
It is partly why GM has recently spent more than $8 million lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill to save Biden’s EV subsidies, among other things. For comparison, GM spent just $3.5 million on lobbying efforts at the end of 2024.
“GM typically averages about $2.67 million per quarter on lobbying, making this [first quarter] blitz particularly notable,” Legis1 reports.
The same GM source said that if Congress and Trump plan to end Biden’s EV tax subsidies, they ought to relax emission standards as well. Earlier this month, Trump signed legislation that would end California’s emission standards that sought to effectively eliminate the sale of gas-powered cars.
“We officially rescue the U.S. auto industry from destruction by terminating the California electric vehicle mandate, once and for all,” Trump told a crowd at the White House. “… this horrible scheme would effectively abolish the internal combustion engine, which most people prefer.”
After Trump’s victory in November 2024, Barra wrote to shareholders that she is appreciative of Trump’s support of American automakers.
“We are also grateful to President Trump for his support of the U.S. automotive industry,” Barra wrote:
We have had continual discussions with the President and his team since before the inauguration. They have invested the time to understand what it takes to be successful in this capital-intensive and highly competitive global industry, how we can work together to grow American manufacturing, and the importance of companies like GM to communities across the country. [Emphasis added]
During the presidential race, the New York Times detailed how GM, Ford, and Stellantis had been lobbying Trump to keep in place Biden’s EV mandate — a regulation that would force the sales of EVs by regulating out of existence gas-powered cars.
Trump refused to allow the pressure campaign to change his mind on the issue, instructing his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin ending the Biden order.
GM has touted its recent investments in American manufacturing, announcing a $4 billion investment this month to increase its U.S.-based production of gas-powered cars and EVs, noting that such money will go mainly to its plants in Michigan, Kansas, and Tennessee.
These were the same plants, however, that GM had announced billion-dollar investments into as part of its agreement with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 2023.
In his first term, Trump had repeatedly blasted Barra for closing plants in Ohio and Michigan, among other states, that forced the layoffs of thousands of American auto workers.
This time around, Barra is taking some blame for GM’s past dust-ups with Trump.
“When we didn’t see eye to eye on some things, I think there’s actually some things where General Motors could have handled some situations better,” Barra said at the Wall Street Journal conference. “We had to do some restructuring, and we could have executed better, which would have positioned it a lot better.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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