The best they can do is probably close their Canadian/Mexican plants if the losses are too great, which would increase unemployment in those areas for not only the automotive factories, but also the ones for the automotive suppliers. Even if a Chinese company swoops in to buy the factories, it’d take time to set things up.

They did that when the TPP was scraped too.

Cheap USBs mean cheap read/writes.

If you’re going on a long road trip, yes.

It’s usually to promote business investments in their state as opposed to general trade. There are plenty of governors that do that from both political parties.

The governor of my state just went to the UAE recently to do that, and has done several other trips as well over the years. https://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/news/press-releases/2024/11/25/gov-whitmer-to-meet-with-business-leaders-and-foreign-officials-in-spain

Definitely related. EVs are relatively new technology and internal knowledge for engineering R&D, materials, and manufacturing infrastructure all have to be spun up. All this, and you need marketing/planning folks to decide on what sort of vehicle will sell the best against their engineering capabilities.