Donald Trump went to a non-union auto plant in Michigan on Thursday, with non-union workers on a non-union floor, to demand that actual striking union auto workers support him in 2024 or else.
Former president Donald Trump sharpened a stridently nationalist pitch for a general election rematch against President Biden, trading the GOP primary debate stage for a factory floor where he demanded union support for his vision of more aggressive state intervention in industrial policy.
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 President Trump 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.
Open threats to auto workers to either join his nationalization of the auto industry or be destroyed. That's the kind of second term Trump wants, and he's making the threats very clear. He has been for months.
And still half the country is willing to re-elect him, not in spite of the carnage he'll wreak upon America, but so they can be backing up the bad guys. Penty of our neighbors, co-workers, and family want a healthy chunk of Americans reduced to second-class status so that they believe they can benefit, or at least stay out of the crosshairs for a while.
History of course tells us what happens to those collaborators.
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