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As North Carolina prepares for electric vehicle manufacturing, Trump says China will dominate the market

Former President Donald Trump recently cast doubt on whether the United States can compete with China on electric vehicle production. The comments come as North Carolina works to become an EV hub.

Speaking during a Michigan town hall Tuesday, former President Trump said U.S. car manufacturers don’t have the materials that China has to produce electric vehicles. He suggested instead focusing on traditional gas-powered ones. 

Investments in North Carolina offer a different take. More than $19 billion has been pledged for manufacturing EVs and parts, supporting 15,000 jobs in the state. That's according to a report from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund last month.

Bill McCaskill is a Democrat running for the board of Commissioners in Randolph County, where a multibillion-dollar plant is being built to make batteries for Toyota electric vehicles. 

Despite what Trump says, he doesn’t think EV manufacturing in North Carolina can be stopped. 

“The car companies have spent so much money on EV production and preparing for future EV production. I don’t think that’s realistic to even say something like that," he says. "If we would go back to gas cars it would really hurt North Carolina’s future.“

McCaskill, a longtime member of the Asheboro City Council, says electric vehicles are not only good for the local economy but also for the environment.

The former president also said he’d slap higher tariffs on vehicles coming into the U.S. without acknowledging that those costs are typically passed on to consumers.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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