President blasts Germany for car sales in United States,

BMW, Mercedes-Benz and VW are getting their turn in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump, who’s mak- ing a habit out of attacking the free trade-dependent auto industry.

“The Germans are bad, very bad,” Der Spiegel quoted Trump as telling unidentified participants in a closed-door meeting Thurs- day with European Union officials in Brussels. “Look at the millions of cars that they sell in the U.S. Terrible. We’re going to stop that.”

European Commission Preside n t Jean-Claude Juncker, asked about the matter at the G-7 gathering in Italy on Friday, confirmed the gist of Trump’s comments but indicated they had been exaggerated due to a translation error.

“It’s not true that the president took an aggres- sive approach when it comes to the German trade surplus,” Juncker, who was pres- ent when Trump made his remarks, told reporters in Taormina. “He didn’t say that the Germans are behaving badly. He said ‘We have a problem, like others, with the German trade surplus.’ “

Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, acknowledged that the president said Germany is “very bad” when it comes to flooding the U.S. with cars, but insisted it wasn’t a dig at one of the U.S.’ most important allies.

Trump’s singling out of German carmakers for con- tributing to that nation’s lopsided trade surplus follows rebukes of Japan’s Toyota and attacks on America’s own automakers for shipping cars from plants in Mexico. The rhetoric overlooks that BMW, Daimler and Volkswa- gen operate some of their biggest factories in southern U.S. states, and the impact that putting a stop to imports would have on the thousands of dealers who sell German vehicles.

“The U.S. president doesn’t argue based on facts but instead comes to conclusions based on alter- native facts like how many cars are currently parked on a New York road or at the Trump Tower,” said Ferdi- nand Dudenhoeffer, director of the University of Duisburg-Essen’s Center for Automotive Research.

Trump has complained repeatedly that Germany’s high trade surplus with the U.S. is hurting the American economy. In a Bild newspaper interview in January, Trump singled out luxury-car maker BMW and threatened it with a 35 percent import duty for foreign-built vehicles sold in the U.S.

“If you go down Fifth Avenue everyone has a Mercedes Benz in front of his house,” he told Bild, while lamenting the lack of Chevrolets in Germany.