Trump to GM: Reopen Ohio assembly plant

US President Donald Trump on Monday said that General Motors Co should reopen an assembly plant in Ohio or "close a plant in China or Mexico, where you invested so heavily pre-Trump, but not in the U.S.A. Bring jobs home!''

Tweets by Trump over the weekend and on Monday were aimed at GM and the United Auto Workers (UAW) to reopen the assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

On Wednesday, Trump is scheduled to make a re-election campaign stop at the Lima Army Tank Plant in northwestern Ohio.

Trump prevailed in Ohio in the 2016 election, a win that helped give him enough electoral votes to become president despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. The state is expected to be critical for Trump if he seeks re-election as promised in 2020.

GM stopped production of the Chevrolet Cruze earlier this month at Lordstown, laying off 1,700 workers. It is one of four GM US plants whose futures will be decided later this year during a renegotiation of the UAW-GM national contract.

In a tweet on Monday morning, Trump said:

"General Motors and the UAW are going to start 'talks' in September/October. Why wait, start them now! I want jobs to stay in the U.S.A. and want Lordstown (Ohio), in one of the best economies in our history, opened or sold to a company who will open it up fast!"

Kristin Dziczek, vice-president of the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, told the Detroit News: "You can't really bully the union or (GM) into doing things that they wouldn't already do. The relationship between the UAW and GM is what it is. Everything else is outside noise, and it doesn't really matter what Trump says, what a governor says — GM and the UAW are the only two groups in the bargaining room."

The UAW's contracts with GM, Ford Motor Co and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV expire on Sept 14.

In November last year, when GM announced that it planned to indefinitely idle Lordstown and a plant in Detroit and one in Baltimore, Maryland, Trump threatened to cut GM's federal subsidies.

After a Sunday phone call with GM CEO Mary Barra, Trump tweeted indicating that the GM chief executive "blamed the UAW union'' for the indefinite idling of Lordstown.

Trump said in a tweet on Sunday evening that he spoke with Barra about the Lordstown plant: "I am not happy that it is closed when everything else in our Country is BOOMING," he said.

GM then responded in a statement on Sunday: "To be clear, under the terms of the UAW-GM National Agreement, the ultimate future of the unallocated plants will be resolved between GM and the UAW. We remain open to talking with all affected stakeholders, but our main focus remains on our employees and offering them jobs in our plants where we have growth opportunities."

GM's agreement with the UAW requires the company to offer plant transfer opportunities. It said on Sunday that it has placed some 1,000 workers from the plants it plans to idle at other GM factory locations.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.