Hours after Trump told donors that Japanese regulators were dropping bowling balls on American cars, the White House said it was an “illustrative” joke.
Hours after President Donald Trump told a group of Missouri donors that Japanese regulators were dropping bowling balls on American automobiles to keep them off the market, the White House insisted the president’s anecdote was just an allegory.
“Obviously, he’s joking about this particular test,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday afternoon, telling a reporter who said he’d covered the auto industry in Japan that Trump’s anecdote was merely “illustrative of creative practices” countries use to keep American goods out of their markets.
But the president, delivering the story Wednesday evening, offered no indication that he was joking. He told donors that one American automaker had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a model car to test the Japanese regulatory barriers, only to be foiled by this specific test.
“It’s called the bowling ball test. You know what that is? That’s where they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. And if the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify,” Trump said at a Missouri fundraiser, an audio recording of which was obtained by NBC News. “It’s horrible, the way we’re treated.”
Reporters scrambled to find factual footing.
