With public surveys consistently showing him with a double-digit lead over his Republican rivals nationally and in early nominating contests, Trump sought to portray the next election as a choice between certain doom for the auto industry or utopian-sounding industrial growth built on trade restrictions, fossil fuels and even expropriation of foreign assets.
“I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for a revival of economic nationalism,” Trump said. “The Wall Street predators, the Chinese cheaters and the corrupt politicians have hurt you. I will make you better. For years, foreign nations have looted and plundered your hopes, your dreams and your heritage, and now they’re going to pay for what they have stolen and what they have done to you, my friends.
He added: “We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories. We’re going to rebuild the industrial bedrock of this country.”
A campaign spokesman did not immediately clarify what Trump meant by taking “their” money and factories.
Without specifying how, Trump suggested he could restore domestic manufacturing immediately and with a pen stroke.
“A vote for nation means the future of the automobile will be made in America,” he said to chants of “USA.” “It will be fueled by American energy. It will be sourced by American suppliers. It will be sculpted from American iron, aluminum and steel, and it will be built by highly skilled American hands and high wage American labor. We’ll do it first day in office; it’ll be signed out first day in office.”
Trump offered his support to striking members of the United Auto Workers but demanded the union’s official endorsement or else warned of their imminent extinction. He excoriated Biden administration policies encouraging domestic investment in electric vehicles, calling them an existential danger to U.S. manufacturing and describing efforts to limit planet-warming emissions as irreconcilable with auto industry jobs.
“It’s a government assassination of your jobs and of your industry, the auto industry is being assassinated,” he said. “To the striking workers, I support you when you go to fair wages and greater stability. And I truly hope you get a fair deal for yourselves and your families. But if your union leaders will not demand that Crooked Joe repeal his electric vehicle mandate immediately, then it doesn’t matter what hourly wage you get. It just doesn’t make a damn bit of difference because in two to three years you will not have one job in this state.”
A Biden campaign spokesman accused Trump of mischaracterizing the current administration’s policies. “Trump had the United States losing the EV race to China and if he had his way, the jobs of the future would be going to China,” spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement.
The UAW, for its part, has said it supports the industry’s transition to electric vehicles but wants to protect workers’ jobs and ensure the same level of pay and labor standards in those plants. Automakers had been building out the EV supply chain outside the union’s contract, shifting jobs to southern states where unions are weaker and paying workers in battery plants less. Union leaders have criticized the Biden administration for supporting those ventures with federal funds.
The UAW has withheld endorsing Biden’s reelection, saying in a letter first reported by the Detroit News that the president should “have our back.” At the same time, the letter said a second Trump administration “would be a disaster.”
The union did not sanction or participate in Trump’s speech, though several individual attendees said they were members. UAW leaders did appear on Tuesday with Biden during a first-ever presidential visit to a picket line on the other side of the Detroit metro area.
Trump criticized the speech as a stunt.
“Yesterday, Joe Biden came to Michigan to pose for photos of the picket line for his policies that send Michigan autoworkers to the unemployment line,” Trump, who has criticized the UAW, said in the speech. “He only came after I announced that I would be here.”
Still, one union member in the audience gave Biden credit for visiting the picket line.
“I may not support Biden, but it’s important for the president of the United States to show interest and that you care about the UAW,” said Isaiah Goddard, who helps build the electric F-150 at Ford’s plant in Rawsonville, Mich. “That goes a long way.”
Trump spoke at a nonunion business, Drake Enterprises, to an audience that included some striking and nonstriking UAW members, as well as nonunionized industry workers and others who retired or left the industry. The campaign distributed signs saying autoworkers and union members for Trump, not all of which ended up in the hands of autoworkers or union members.
Unions have historically supported Democrats, and Biden won Michigan’s union households by 62 percent to Trump’s 37 percent, according to 2020 exit polls. But Trump has made inroads with working-class voters who traditionally voted for Democrats and is trying to peel off rank-and-file union members from their leaders, a bid to repeat his gains with Midwestern blue-collar workers that helped him win the electoral college in 2016.
“The fact that Biden is shifting up his schedule to go to Michigan to try to hold his standing with UAW workers shows just how perilous of a political position Biden is in right now because Democrats will have you believe Michigan is a blue state and Democrats will have you believe that Joe Biden is a champion of union workers,” Trump senior adviser Jason Miller said before Wednesday’s speech.
Protesters at the driveway held signs attacking Trump as anti-union, briefly standing off with Trump supporters marching with a colonial-style drum while one man waved a flag for the Three Percenters militia, one of the extremist groups involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Three years later we’re worse off than before Biden was installed, and yes you can quote me that the election was stolen,” said Mark Curneal, a 26-year auto industry veteran and union member from Madison Heights, Mich. “Trump says he supports workers. If he didn’t support me, he wouldn’t be here.”
