“You’re going to be very happy. There’s a lot of money coming your way. There’s a lot of money. You’re going to say, ‘Please, sir, we don’t want this kind of success. Please, sir. It’s too much. We can’t take it. Please, we beg you, we don’t want this much success,’” Trump continued. “But we do really, don’t we? We’re going to be so successful.”
He called Japan an “amazing country” with “great people.”
Just two weeks ago, however, the United Steelworkers union blasted Nippon as “a serial trade cheater” and accused Japan’s largest steel manufacturer of “simply seeking to undercut our domestic industry from the inside.”
“It is simply absurd to think that we could ever entrust the future of one of our most vital industries — essential to both national defense and critical infrastructure — to a company whose unfair trade practices continue to this day,” United Steelworkers International President David McCall said in a May 22 statement. “President Trump has publicly pledged to block this sale since January 2024. We now urge him to act decisively, shutting the door once and for all on this corporate sellout of American Steelworkers and defending U.S. manufacturing.”
In a press release issued Friday, McCall declined to speculate on the nature of the deal, on which he said the union was not consulted.
“Issuing press releases and making political speeches is easy. Binding commitments are hard. The devil is always in the details, and that is especially true with a bad actor like Nippon Steel that has again and again violated our trade laws, devastating steel communities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” he said. “Our members know from decades of negotiating contracts: Trust nothing until you see it in writing.”
Nippon’s heavy reliance on coal, rather than electric arc furnaces or other innovations, to produce steel has drawn fierce criticism of the U.S. Steel acquisition from U.S. climate groups. Instead of investing in new technologies like those planned by rivals such as Nucor and Cleveland-Cliffs, Nippon has proposed upgrading U.S. Steel’s blast furnaces to extend operations by decades.
Last summer, shareholders warned that the tie-up risked raising Nippon’s already steep costs of decarbonizing its facilities in Japan. A report published last month by the advocacy group SteelWatch found Nippon is not planning any significant reduction in planet-heating pollution from its supply chain between now and 2040.
“With its focus on technology to only partially reduce emissions at coal-based production facilities, its increasingly large investments in Australian coal mines, and its promise to prolong blast furnace production at U.S. Steel plants during its acquisition bid, Nippon Steel is looking more and more like a coal company that also makes steel,” Roger Smith, Asia lead at SteelWatch, said in a statement.
