WASHINGTON – Speaking to workers at a Wisconsin shipbuilding facility, President Donald Trump touted American manufacturing and took credit for helping design a better-looking class of U.S. Navy warships. .
“The ships they were building look terrible,” Trump told Fincantieri Marinette Marine workers on Thursday. “I would change the designs, I looked at it. I said, ‘It’s a terrible-looking boat, let’s make it beautiful.'”
“You know sometimes you can make it look great for less money. I said, ‘This is not a good ship. Let’s change the design of it,'” he continued. “And people came in, and we saw different designs, and while we do it and see what you’re doing, how beautiful it is.”
“It is like a missile yacht,” the president said of warships built in the United States.
United States President Donald Trump greets after speaking with guests during a visit to Fincantieri’s Marine Marine shipyard on June 25, 2020 in Marinette, Wisconsin.
Scott Olson | fake pictures
Trump has long pledged to return manufacturing from abroad, equating that effort with American renewal. At the shipyard, he said the future of the facility had looked bleak not so long ago, but “then a lot of good things came up.”
“Manufacturing, remember, manufacturing will never come back. Well, it did. It came back in a big way,” Trump said.
His comments come immediately after a $ 5.5 billion Pentagon contract with shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine for the new class of US Navy warships under the contract, which was awarded in April, the Navy frigates will be built at the Fincantieri shipyard in Marinette, Wisconsin, which currently produces the U.S. Navy littoral combat ships.
The Pentagon estimated that the first ship would cost $ 1.2 billion. The subsequent nine ships would cost up to approximately $ 781 million, in constant 2018 dollars, Navy officials said in an April call with reporters.
Read more: CNBC spent a day aboard the new class of Navy warships
Trump’s visit to Wisconsin came as election polls in the crucial decisive state show great support for presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
A New York Times / Siena College poll released Thursday found Biden leading Trump in Wisconsin by 11 points. Trump narrowly defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, turning the state red for the first time in a presidential contest since 1988.
The Times poll shows the president also follows Biden in five other battlefield states Trump won in 2016. The president’s comments were largely improvised before a cheering crowd at the Wisconsin shipyard gave the event the appearance of a campaign stopped as much as presidential visit
Biden, who traveled to the Pennsylvania battlefield on Thursday, said Trump did not deserve credit for the success of the area he was visiting.
“Today, Donald Trump is on Marinette to take credit for the successes fueled by the Obama-Biden administration in an attempt to hide the fact that Wisconsin has been bleeding blue collar manufacturing jobs in recent weeks,” he said. it’s a statement. “Instead of offering real relief to working families, he is trying to claim credit for the progress on Marinette that he did not build.”
The trip came days after the Trump campaign resumed the bustling protests in the arena that defined his 2016 campaign, but were suspended amid the coronavirus pandemic. While both Trump and Biden have been removed from the campaign, polls show Trump is falling behind the former vice president, as voters are upset by the incumbent’s handling of the virus and his reaction to civil unrest over the George Floyd’s death.
At this point in the cycle, no other Republican or Democrat candidate in the past four elections was as far ahead of his opponent as Biden is against Trump, according to CNBC poll averages posted on RealClearPolitics.
– Reuters contributed to this report.
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