Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden came out Thursday with a new plan to “Buy American.”
President Trump came out Friday and said Biden stole the plan from him.
“He plagiarized from me but he can never pull it off,” the president told reporters at the White House just before he took off aboard Marine One en route to Florida. “He likes plagiarizing. It’s a plan that is very radical left but he says the right things because he’s copying what I’ve done. But the difference is he can’t do it, and he knows he’s not doing that.”
Trump also said that while he’s spent the last three years stripping away federal regulations, Biden would enact new ones.
“He can’t do the same because he’s raising taxes way too much; he’s raising everybody’s taxes. He’s also putting tremendous amounts of regulations back on, and those two things are two primary reasons that I created the greatest economy we’ve ever had and now we’re creating it again,” Trump said.
Biden on Thursday rolled out a $700 billion economic plan that would spend $400 billion on a federal “Buy American” project, as well as $300 billion on research and development of technologies such as electric vehicles, 5G cellular networks and artificial intelligence. The “Buy American” plan would create at least 5 million new jobs in “manufacturing and innovation,” according to an outline provided by the campaign, which touted the “largest mobilization of public investments in procurement, infrastructure and [research and development] since the second world war.”
The former vice president is well aware that Trump’s major strength is the economy, at least before the coronavirus swept the nation and cost more than 40 million Americans their jobs. Biden’s plan, dubbed “Build Back Better,” is an effort to hit Trump directly on his strongest issue.
But even the New York Times acknowledged that Trump has long pushed the “Buy American” idea.
“In some ways, Mr. Biden was seizing the ‘Buy American’ message from Mr. Trump himself, who campaigned on an ‘America First’ agenda in 2016 and wrote on Twitter on his Inauguration Day that ‘Buy American’ and ‘Hire American’ were ‘two simple rules’ that would guide his administration,” The Times wrote Friday.
Biden unveiled his plan while giving a speech at a metalworks factory in Dunmore, Pa., not far from his childhood home of Scranton, where he stopped and took a knee in front of his boyhood home.
“I do not buy for one second that the vitality of American manufacturing is a thing of the past,” Biden said in his speech. “When the federal government spends taxpayers’ money, we should use it to buy American products and support American jobs,” Biden said.
Biden also took aim at Trump.
“Throughout this crisis, Donald Trump has been almost singularly focused on the stock market, the Dow, the Nasdaq – not you, not your families,” he said. “If I am fortunate enough to be elected president, I’ll be laser-focused on working families.”
