Trump urges top automakers to build new factories in U.S.

President Donald Trump met Tuesday with the chief e xe c u t i v e s o f t h e t h r e e Det ro i t au t o maker s a n d urged them to build new factories in the United States, and he vowed to change environmental regulations to encourage the creation of jobs.

The tenor of the White House meeting appeared far more cooperative than adversarial, despite the president’s repeated criticisms of automakers in recent weeks for building cars in Mexico for sale in the U.S. market.

Trump stuck to the “America First” theme of his new administration, and he challenged executives of the automakers — General Motors, Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler — to add jobs and production in exchange for more favorable regulations and tax policies.

“It’s the long-term jobs we are looking for,” Trump said in televised comments before the meeting with CEOs Mary T. Barra from GM, Mark Fields of Ford and Sergio Marchionne from Fiat Chrysler.

Earlier in the day, the president made plain in a Twitter post his interest in increasing auto jobs.

“I want new plants to be built here for cars sold here,” he wrote.

It is a provocative challenge for the Detroit companies, which have each added more than 25,000 jobs in the United St ates since the recession, when auto sales collapsed, and GM and Chrysler both went bankrupt and needed government bailouts to survive.

But with the U.S. market coming off a record sales year of 17.5 million vehicles and car companies reporting big profits, the Detroit executives sounded eager to participate in the Trump administration’s pro-business agenda.

After the meeting, Fields said Ford was excited to participate in “a renaissance in American manufacturing,” and Barra said the industry could benefit from cooperating with Washington.

“There’s a large opportunity in working together as an industry with the government,” she said.

Marchionne said in a statement, “We look forward to working with President Trump and members of Congress to strengthen American manufacturing.”

The meeting was notable in that foreign automakers such as Toyota and Honda were not invited, although factories owned by European and Asian companies account for about 40 percent of the vehicles assembled in the United States.

It also left open the question of how much more production capacit y GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler can effectively add in the United States — particularly if consumer demand levels off or drops.