Vice President JD Vance toured Nucor Steel Berkeley in Huger on Thursday and used a speech to the mill’s workers to defend the Trump administration’s trade policies.

Vance and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin came to the Berkeley County mill to deliver remarks “highlighting America’s manufacturing renaissance during the first one hundred days of the Trump Administration,” the White House said in an advisory.

Nucor Chair, President and CEO Leon Topalian and Jon Witherow, whom the vice president’s office identified as a Nucor Steel vice president and general manager, were to greet Vance, a spokesman for the vice president told reporters, according to a press pool report filed by Zolan Kanno-Youngs of The New York Times.

Inside the mill

From a control room in the melt shop, Vance watched steel being melted in a furnace, the pool report said. Later, in the control room of the hot mill, he pointed at a spreadsheet on a screen and asked an employee, “Does it tell you how many coils are in each order here?”

On the drive in, the motorcade passed tall piles of scrap metal and scores of steel coils and beams, the pool reporter wrote. A staffer on site said all the coils are made of recycled metal.

Vance spoke from a stage in front of a building marked “Nucor Steel Berkeley,” with workers in green hard hats on bleachers behind him.

“For decades, Nucor has been an engine of American industry,” Vance said, according to the White House transcript. He said the administration is grateful for “the billions of dollars in new capital investments Nucor has announced in just the last few months.”

He said Nucor’s chief executive told him the plant runs four shifts. “You got about a thousand workers here, and they’re earning great wages and doing a great job,” Vance said.

The trade pitch

Much of the speech was about trade and manufacturing. Vance said critics of the president’s trade policies “ought to know better.”

“I’ve talked to people here today who talk about expanding facilities, building new steelmaking facilities because of the trade policies that Donald J. Trump has implemented,” he said.

He then asked the crowd, “Do you want to ship American jobs off to the People’s Republic of China?” The audience answered, “No!”

The 25% tariff on imported steel has widened this year. A proclamation Trump signed Feb. 10 ended the alternative arrangements that had covered steel from trading partners including Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and European Union countries, extended the tariff to more derivative steel products as of March 12 and revoked the process for granting product exclusions.

Vance said Thursday’s visit was his first tour of a steel mill, even though his grandfather spent 40 years as a welder at Armco Steel in Middletown, Ohio. “This is an incredibly high-tech facility,” he said. Later, he told the workers to “never let anybody tell you that this is not high tech.”

Zeldin introduced Vance. Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace also attended, Vance noted in his remarks.

What Nucor is building here

The Huger site holds a sheet mill and a steel beam mill. In its most recent annual report, filed in February, Nucor lists about 2.43 million square feet of facilities in Berkeley County, where it makes flat-rolled and structural steel. Topalian started his Nucor career at the Berkeley mill in 1996 as a project engineer and then cold mill production supervisor, the report says.

Nucor is building a galvanizing line at the mill that will be able to coat 500,000 tons of steel a year for automotive and consumer durables customers in the Southeast, according to an investor presentation released April 28. Nucor expects to spend about $150 million on the line this year and to finish construction by mid-2026, the presentation said.

A softer quarter

The visit came three days after Nucor reported first-quarter net earnings of $156 million, or 67 cents a share, down from $845 million, or $3.46 a share, a year earlier. Net sales were $7.83 billion.

“Despite recent financial market volatility, Nucor is seeing solid demand for the steel and steel products we manufacture,” Topalian said in the earnings release. “Our healthy balance sheet and diverse product portfolio position us well, even in uncertain times.”

Nucor, based in Charlotte, N.C., runs six sheet mills, including the one in Berkeley County, according to its annual report. It started up the Berkeley County sheet mill in 1996 and the beam mill there in 1999, according to its annual reports from those years.