Yes its true, Trump has invoked the Korean war-era Defense Production Act, Which allows a president to force companies to make products for national defense. Is it legal? Yes it is.
At first Trump had stated that the Defense order was unnecessary due to the companies voluntarily converting their operations to help fight the spread of the CoronaVirus.
Earlier Trump complained to GM about them lowering the number of ventilators they had promised from 40,000 to 6,000, quite the significant decrease.
GM is now saying it can build at least 10,000 ventilators per month from April. GM has been working with medical devise manufacturer, Ventec Life Systems, to build ventilators in the car makers plant, another plant of GM’s will also be used to make surgical mask.
This comes in after the U.S. Cases have surpassed 100k while the death toll is still lagging well behind other high impacted countries such as Italy or China