When the auto strike broke out in Detroit, Joe Biden went on the offensive. The Democrat, who describes himself as the most pro-union president the US has ever known, beat Donald Trump to the punch and visited a picket line, a first for a US president. Even Roosevelt didn't dare.
Conservative channel Fox News sought to dismantle the political stunt: 87 seconds of Biden speaking, a handful of union workers and as many secret service personnel to protect the president. In reality, if Biden is the candidate of the unions, Donald Trump is the candidate of the workers: this is attested to by the 2020 result – 56% versus 41% among voters of all races whose studies went no further than high school, according to a Pew survey. "Of the 265 counties most dominated by blue-collar workers – areas where at least 40 percent of employed adults have jobs in construction, the service industry or other nonprofessional fields – Biden won only 15," wrote the New York Times in late 2020. On the other hand, Biden won 56% of union votes (10% of workers) versus 42% for Trump.
The battle on this terrain will be fierce in 2024, and the angle of attack taken by Trump, in a non-unionized factory in a white suburb north of Detroit on Wednesday, September 27, was a case in point. He could easily have started the fight on inflation, which has risen by 18% while the median after-tax wage fell 8.8% in 2022. But he didn't.
Trump decided to attack electric cars and the energy transition promoted by President Biden. "You're all on the picket lines and everything, but it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what you get because in two years you're all going to be out of business," he said, adding that the auto industry was "being assassinated" by Biden and accusing the president of putting Michigan workers out of work: "He's selling you out to China, he's selling you out to the environmental extremists and the radical left."
The electric car industry hires far fewer workers than the traditional automotive industry, and battery factories – joint ventures created with Asian manufacturers – are mostly non-unionized, with lower wages. Finally, the former president accused batteries of polluting: "You know, those batteries when they get rid of 'em and lots of bad things happen. And when they're digging it out of the ground to make those batteries, it's going to be very bad for the environment."
A year ago, the presidential campaign seemed to crystallize around abortion, wokeness and transgender people, as evidenced by the emergence of Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. His campaign for the Republican nomination flopped, and the debate returned to the Trump fundamentals of 2016, "America first" and protectionism. "I'm here tonight to lay out a vision of a revival of economic nationalism... I want a future that protects American labor, not foreign labor. A future that puts American dreams over foreign profits," said Trump. Companies from Asia (such as Samsung, TSM and LG) and Europe (Volkswagen) also benefit from the subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act, Joe Biden's subsidy programs, because they have the skills.
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