At the NATO summit on July 7, President Trump delivered a piece of good economic news. Toyota, he said, is 'moving out of Mexico into the United States, and building one of the biggest truck and car plants ever built' [4]. On Truth Social he added the reason: 'Tariffs at work!' [4]. The announcement he was reacting to is real. Almost every specific thing he said about it is not.
It is an expansion, not a new mega-plant. Toyota announced a 3.6 billion dollar investment to expand the San Antonio plant it has run since 2003, adding a second assembly line and about 2,000 jobs [1]. That is a substantial and genuinely good addition to an existing site. It is not, by any measure, one of the biggest truck and car plants ever built.
Toyota is also not moving out of Mexico. What is shifting is production of one model, the Tacoma, from Toyota's Baja California plant to the expanded Texas site over about four years [1][3]. The company will keep building Tacomas at its plant in Guanajuato, Mexico, and said plainly that it 'remains committed to its operations throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico' [2]. A single line relocating is not a company leaving a country.
The tariff credit is the president's, not the company's. Toyota did not attribute the expansion to tariffs [4]; automakers plan plant investments years in advance. There is a real story worth telling here: an automaker is adding 2,000 jobs and a production line in Texas. It just is not a company fleeing Mexico to build a record factory because of tariffs, which is the version that was told from the summit stage.
