June 2, 2025 - In December, President Donald Trump said he was ?“totally against” Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel’s plan to buy its American rival U.S. Steel, warning ?“Buyer Beware!!!” in a social media post.

On Friday night, however, Trump traveled to a U.S. Steel plant near Pittsburgh to celebrate that potential deal, describing it as a ?“blockbuster agreement that will ensure this storied American company stays an American company.”

“You’re going to stay an American company. You know that, right?” Trump said in an hour-long speech at the plant. ?“But we’re going to have a great partner.”

The terms of the takeover are not yet clear. Later on Friday, after returning to Washington, Trump told reporters he still hadn’t granted the acquisition his final approval. 

“We haven’t seen that final deal yet,” he said, according to a White House transcript.

The Friday speech follows weeks of headlines suggesting the Trump administration was seeking a way to push through the once-dead deal. The nearly $15 billion bid fell apart in January when then-President Joe Biden blocked the sale on the grounds that foreign ownership of U.S. Steel ?“threatens to impair the national security of the United States,” though the decision was widely seen as a concession to labor groups.

Not everyone’s happy the Trump administration has revived talks. Critics of the potential deal range from steelmaking unions to environmental advocates, who say it would threaten efforts to clean up carbon emissions and local air pollution from the industry. Steelmaking is one of the most emissions-intensive sectors in the world, though it is fairly low-carbon in the U.S. due to the prevalence of mini mills that recycle steel using electric arc furnaces that don’t burn coal.

Nippon Steel has floated building a new electric arc furnace in the U.S. if the deal goes through — but it has also pledged to extend the life of U.S. Steel’s coal-burning furnaces. The aging blast furnaces are linked to some of the worst air quality in the U.S.

“Nippon Steel’s bet on coal and disregard for innovation lock in the path [of] dependence that led to U.S. Steel’s diminished position,” more than two dozen environmental groups wrote in a letter to Congress last October. ?“Research suggests that continuing to rely on coal will lead to more job losses, further diminishing the manufacturing skilled workforce.”

Though the deal terms remain opaque, Trump offered greater clarity — at least, for now — around the trade policy he said undergirded the deal. He said on Friday that he’d double tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50%, a hike that roiled global steel stocks on Monday and sent shares in U.S. steelmakers soaring.

Trump’s speech outside of Pittsburgh did little to clear confusion over his position on the deal, which has shifted over the last year.

The president struck a jubilant tone while dozens of workers clad in red hard hats sat behind him, below a sign that read ?“The Golden Age.”

“You’re going to be very happy. There’s a lot of money coming your way. There’s a lot of money. You’re going to say, ?‘Please, sir, we don’t want this kind of success. Please, sir. It’s too much. We can’t take it. Please, we beg you, we don’t want this much success,’” Trump continued. ?“But we do really, don’t we? We’re going to be so successful.”

He called Japan an ?“amazing country” with ?“great people.”

Just two weeks ago, however, the United Steelworkers union blasted Nippon as ?“a serial trade cheater” and accused Japan’s largest steel manufacturer of ?“simply seeking to undercut our domestic industry from the inside.”

“It is simply absurd to think that we could ever entrust the future of one of our most vital industries — essential to both national defense and critical infrastructure — to a company whose unfair trade practices continue to this day,” United Steelworkers International President David McCall said in a May 22 statement. ?“President Trump has publicly pledged to block this sale since January 2024. We now urge him to act decisively, shutting the door once and for all on this corporate sellout of American Steelworkers and defending U.S. manufacturing.”

In a press release issued Friday, McCall declined to speculate on the nature of the deal, on which he said the union was not consulted.

“Issuing press releases and making political speeches is easy. Binding commitments are hard. The devil is always in the details, and that is especially true with a bad actor like Nippon Steel that has again and again violated our trade laws, devastating steel communities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” he said. ?“Our members know from decades of negotiating contracts: Trust nothing until you see it in writing.”

Nippon’s heavy reliance on coal, rather than electric arc furnaces or other innovations, to produce steel has drawn fierce criticism of the U.S. Steel acquisition from U.S. climate groups. Instead of investing in new technologies like those planned by rivals such as Nucor and Cleveland-Cliffs, Nippon has proposed upgrading U.S. Steel’s blast furnaces to extend operations by decades.

Last summer, shareholders warned that the tie-up risked raising Nippon’s already steep costs of decarbonizing its facilities in Japan. A report published last month by the advocacy group SteelWatch found Nippon is not planning any significant reduction in planet-heating pollution from its supply chain between now and 2040.

“With its focus on technology to only partially reduce emissions at coal-based production facilities, its increasingly large investments in Australian coal mines, and its promise to prolong blast furnace production at U.S. Steel plants during its acquisition bid, Nippon Steel is looking more and more like a coal company that also makes steel,” Roger Smith, Asia lead at SteelWatch, said in a statement.