General Motors found itself in the crosshairs of President Trump's Twitter feed on Friday, who criticized the automaker for failing to produce the 40,000 ventilators needed to combat the coronavirus outbreak. Yahoo! Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman joins The Final Round to discuss.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right. Let's get to Rick Newman now, and a little bit more, Rick, I guess on, we now have official news on a story we were set to talk about, which is Trump's deal with GM. Now we know he has actually ordered HHS Secretary Alex Azar to get GM to produce ventilators under the Defense Production Act. But you followed Trump's, I guess we could call it, beef, with Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, for several years here. And this is, you know, it's unfortunate. This is such an important time for public health, and yet it's kind of just another chapter in another Trumpian saga.

RICK NEWMAN: Well, Trump loves Mary Barra, the General Motors CEO when she's doing what he wants her to do, but he dislikes her when she's not. Same with many CEOs. So it's hard to tell what's going on here. But this does involve whether Trump is invoking or not invoking the DPA, this Defense Production Act, this 1950s law that does give him authority to call American manufacturers into action to produce things America needs on an emergency basis.

What seems to be going on here, there's been this push and pull. So it's going to take, you know, first of all, General Motors doesn't make ventilators. They make automobiles. So it's not like they just have a ventilator assembly line and all they have to do is speed it up. They don't do that. They're partnering with this other company that does make ventilators called Ventec, to try to get this moving faster and use GM's expertise and its supply chains and things like that.

But the best case scenario there is more ventilators coming out maybe in a month. So they can't just turn this on overnight. And what GM is probably thinking, and maybe Trump is even thinking, is hey, we're going to, we might get to peak production of these ventilators at some point in June, July, August or September. Is anybody going to actually be wanting them? I mean, if we're making tens of thousands of these things, but the pandemic has passed, who's on the hook for the cost?

So my guess is, once we learn more details, this is all going to be about who's on the hook for the cost if we end up not needing all these things. So the federal government is supposed to buy these from the manufacturers, even under the DPA. They don't just take them, they buy them. But it sounds like Trump didn't want to commit to spending too much money, because he too, might be thinking, well, what if we don't need all these ventilators.

So he seems to have taken another step here today. We don't know all the details of this yet. But that is just going to get GM to build these things. And by the way, GM today, after Trump attacked the company, about an hour and a half later they came out and said, we are proceeding full steam ahead with this partnership with Ventec. We are going to make these ventilators. So that's what we stand for now. I guess we're going to get more ventilators out of this eventually.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, and ventilators, it seems like we're certainly going to need.