Todd Spangler and Brent Snavely

Detroit Free Press

WASHINGTON — Moving quickly on a promise to spark job creation in the manufacturing sector, President Donald Trump will meet with the CEOs of the Detroit Three automakers on Tuesday morning at the White House.

At his first full press briefing Monday, new White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made note of Trump's plans to hold a breakfast meeting with representatives of Fiat Chrysler, Ford and General Motors.

No specific agenda was released for the meeting at the White House, but Spicer said the general theme is a discussion of how "to bring more jobs back to the industry."

The meeting should give the auto executives a chance to press their case about jobs they have created in the U.S. in recent years, and how interconnected their plants in Mexico are with U.S. operations.

In recent days, Trump has repeated a campaign pledge to renegotiate or withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which critics in Michigan and elsewhere argue has cost the auto industry thousands of jobs since its enactment in the 1990s, even though the evidence is mixed.

Many experts say completely withdrawing from NAFTA would create chaos for the auto industry, lead to increased prices for many vehicles and could lead to financial losses.

"Either their costs would go up if they had to pay tariffs, or production would simply be reduced or stopped," said Marina Whitman, professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan.

Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to win Michigan since 1988 after running a campaign in which he promised to revitalize manufacturing in the U.S. and penalize American companies — including automakers — who use operations in Mexico or other countries to keep costs down on products imported back into the U.S.

GM CEO Mary Barra, Ford CEO Mark Fields and Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne all plan to attend Tuesday's breakfast meeting representatives for each automaker confirmed Monday.

Two weeks ago, Marchionne said automakers need to know more about the trade and regulatory policies Trump plans to pursue.

“I need clarity. I think we all need clarity,” Marchionne said at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. "And we are not the only ones that need clarity."

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American automakers have been notching strong profits in recent years, but throughout the campaign, Trump complained about manufacturers creating jobs in Mexico and other countries rather than the U.S.

Across the U.S. and in Michigan, manufacturing jobs have rebounded since the the low point in the wake of the last recession, but still are far below historical records.

When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the U.S. boasted 16.8 million manufacturing jobs. As of July, there were 12.3 million. That’s down 27%, though the number has risen since bottoming out at 11.5 million in March 2011.

Trump has vowed to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs, saying he'll renegotiate NAFTA with the Mexican and Canadian governments. But Trump also on Monday formally began the process for withdrawing the U.S. from a Pacific Rim trade deal which he — and many Democrats from Midwestern states, including Michigan — had criticized for not being a good enough deal for American exporters.

Spicer said that, in the future, the Trump administration will focus on bilateral agreements instead of multinational ones like the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

Trump's press office had already said he will meet with Mexican President Peña Nieto on trade, immigration and security Jan. 31.

But Whitman argues that renegotiating NAFTA is unlikely to restore U.S. manufacturing jobs. That's partly because a lot of manufacturing jobs have been eliminated because of increased automation and, in other industries, manufacturing jobs have been lost to China and other countries with even lower labor costs.

"The whole process of automobile production is now so intertwined, that to try to untangle that would be a terrible blow to the industry," Whitman said. "If the auto industry had to realign the production of arrangements between the U.S. and Canada ... it just would cause mayhem for the industry."

The U.S., Mexico and Canada are signatories to NAFTA, which was created in the 1990s. Trump has said if he can't renegotiate NAFTA, he will withdraw from it. As president, Trump has the authority to pull the U.S. out of the agreement with six months' notice.

The announcement of Trump's meeting with the Detroit Three executives followed a Monday morning meeting with a group of business leaders at the White House that included the heads of Michigan-based businesses: Andrew Liveris, president, chairman and CEO of Midland-based Dow Chemical; Jeff Fettig, chairman and CEO of Benton Harbor-based appliance maker Whirlpool, and Dearborn-based Ford's Fields.

Kicking off his first week in charge, Trump, who was inaugurated as the nation’s 45th chief executive on Friday, held the breakfast meeting in the Roosevelt Room and promised the dozen business leaders gathered there that he plans to follow through on campaign promises to slash taxes and regulations on corporate America.

“We are going to be cutting taxes massively for both the middle class and for companies. And that’s massively. We’re trying to get it down to anywhere from 15% to 20%,” Trump told the business leaders, according to a report by the White House press pool. “We think we can cut regulations by 75%,” he added. “Maybe more.”

Trump, the Republican nominee who handily won the Electoral College to become president despite losing the popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, said that despite the regulatory cuts he is promising, what remains will be “just as strong and just as good and just as protective of the people.”

“The problem with the regulation you have right now is that you can’t do anything,” he said. The pool report did not include any specific mention of regulations which could be reduced, but Trump has talked about relaxing environmental and other regulations that critics believe hamper business.

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After the meeting, Fields said he was encouraged by Trump's pro-business policies in other areas, such as corporate taxes.

"Walking out of the meeting today, I know I come out with a lot of confidence that the president is very, very serious on making sure that the United States economy is going to be strong and have policies, tax, regulatory or trade to drive that," Fields said on CNBC's Squawk Box. "So it was a very, very positive meeting, and I think a positive meeting for the United States of America and manufacturing in general."

Spicer said that the meeting, which was supposed to last an hour, ended up running for two and was “a really great exchange of ideas." He said Trump plans to reconvene the group in a month and then hold quarterly meetings with the panel.

Contact Todd Spangler: 703-854-8947 or at tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tsspangler. Free Press reporter Brent Snavely contributed to this report.