He is not even hiding the fact US automakers make a more expensive inferior product, but that US consumers should not be allowed have the superior one.
I'm a strong advocate for giving Chinese EVs an import quota per manufacturer (with a 1.5mm-unit annual cap on total Chinese EV imports, downgradable to 1mm in a recession, representing about 10% of demand).
This gives American consumers–and designers–access to and a taste for what the competition is doing. But it preserves a moat for our own producers.
This was widely predicted by economists at the time, even by the few Brexit supporting economists.
Perhaps many of these claims are true, but at least in USA I also see huge amounts of subsidies for a lot of products, which are never compared with the Chinese subsidies.
I have never heard about any significant investment in some factory in the USA, which was not conditioned by very large reductions in taxes for that company. I do not see any difference between this and any subsidies that China might have.
Even if there might exist some kind of subsidizing system for electric vehicles in China, there is no doubt that there exists healthy competition between many Chinese companies, so they continuously innovate in EVs, while much less efforts in this direction can be seen in countries like USA, who claim to be scared by the Chinese "unfair" competition, but they seem to do very little or nothing to reduce their technical inferiority.
At least the Chinese got good cars from subsidizing their auto makers. Americans just got ripped off.
But of course the US (or Canada) can't justify their 100% duty in those terms, so they don't even try.