Politico

CLINTON TOWNSHIP, MICH. — The main political split screen Wednesday night wasn’t Donald Trump appearing at a rally in Michigan next to his Republican primary rivals debating in California.

It was the former president trying to woo auto workers in a critical battleground state, and the current president who did the same the day before.

Trump traveled to the Detroit area on Wednesday night to counterprogram the GOP’s second debate. But the visit sent a warning shot to President Joe Biden that he was already looking ahead to the general election — and he wants to win back the support of some of the same union workers who helped put him in the White House in 2016.

Over and over, Trump attacked Biden and his administration’s policies on electric vehicles and clean energy as a threat to the auto industry and the livelihoods of auto industry workers.

“Yesterday Joe Biden came to Michigan to pose for photos at the picket line, but his policies that send workers to the unemployment line,” Trump said. “He only came after I announced that I would be here.”

Throughout the over hourlong speech, it was clear that Biden — and not the rest of the GOP field — is Trump’s main target. He did not mention his main opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is in second place, or the GOP debate until he was almost 30 minutes into his speech.

“We’re competing with the job candidates — they’re all job candidates — and want to be Secretary of something or they even say VP. Has anybody seen a VP anywhere?” Trump said.

Trump’s speech was delivered at Drake Enterprises, Inc., a non-union auto parts manufacturer located northeast of Detroit in Clinton Township, Michigan, and was billed as being his “vision for a revival of economic nationalism and our automobile manufacturing lifeline.”

“My pledge to everyone is that a vote for President Trump means the future of the automobile will be made in America,” said Trump. “It will be fueled by American energy, sourced by American suppliers, it will be sculpted from American aluminum and steel, and it will be built by highly skilled American hands and high-wage, American labor.”

As Trump spoke, his Republican opponents halfway across the country were preparing to take the stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Once again Trump chose not to participate in the debate, citing his commanding lead in Republican primary polling.

“Biden’s trip also underscores the fact that despite what Democrats might say, Michigan is very much in play. And the important voter bloc of UAW labor employees are very much in play as well,” said Jason Miller, an advisor to Trump.

In response to Trump’s speech, Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement, “Donald Trump is lying about President Biden’s agenda to distract from his failed track record of trickle-down tax cuts, closed factories, and jobs outsourced to China. There is no ‘EV mandate.’ Simply put: 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.”

Republicans and Democrats both see blue-collar and union worker support as key to winning Michigan, a swing state that Trump won in 2016 by only just over 10,000 votes, but lost in 2020 to Biden by more than 150,000 votes.

But union member support for Biden and Trump has shifted recently in Michigan, according to polling by EPIC MRA. In its August survey of 600 likely 2024 voters, 46 percent of union members polled backed Trump compared with 43 percent for Biden; two months earlier, Biden had led Trump 51 percent to 42 percent with the same group.

Bernie Porn, the president of EPIC MRA, attributed some of that change to efforts to transition to electric vehicles.

“The polling that we’ve done in Michigan shows that people are not excited yet about EVs,” Porn said, adding, “There are a lot of rebuttals that Biden and Democrats can use in terms of their messaging, but clearly, the White House needs to talk about transitioning to reassure union members that this whole EV effort is not going to be selling out union members.”

Time and again on Wednesday night, Trump attacked Biden for pushing electric vehicles on the public. He claimed it was part mandate, part “assassination” of the auto industry, leaving the actual details of the policy behind.

In fact, the Biden administration has set an ambitious goal of 50 percent electric vehicle sales by 2030 — which they plan to reach through billions of dollars in subsidies to manufacture EVs, batteries, and charging stations — as a way of competing with China and combating climate change.

It’s a shift that has left the auto unions nervous. And some union workers in Michigan said they were skeptical of the shift.

“He’s forcing the issue, he’s mandating through his EPA that we have 50 percent electric cars by 2030? It’s ridiculous, that’s seven years away. It doesn’t make sense. We don’t have infrastructure for it, and it’s going to destroy all of our jobs,” said John Jackson, 46, a UAW member and production worker from Warren, Michigan, at the picket line on Wednesday.

Jackson said he did not vote for Trump in 2020, but planned to next year if his choice is between Biden and Trump again: “I think Trump is way more on our side than Biden is.”

But Trump’s appeal to union workers does have its limits. He didn’t appear at a union shop on Wednesday night. And his actual record on labor issues has been decidedly in contrast with the union agenda.

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), called Trump’s claims about the unions in Michigan “smoke and mirrors.”

“We have to remember that Trump blamed auto workers when things didn’t go his way. He is one who puts sand in the wheel, he gums up the gears. And if it weren’t for House Democrats, we would have never renegotiated NAFTA and put in fair labor standards and practices that advantage and bolster the American union auto worker.”

Kimberly Rush, 42, an African American UAW worker from Detroit who was also at the picket line Wednesday, praised Biden for coming to show solidarity with the union this week.

“For him to be the first president and actually stand with us, I give him props for that — I’m not sure if it’s campaign-motivated or not, but we’ll see,” Rush said. Though she voted for Biden in 2020, she said she remains undecided on who she will support in 2024, specifically pointing to his support for Ukraine, the economy, health care, and EVs as causes for concern.

At Trump’s speech, the crowd appeared to be a mix of UAW members and non-union workers. Of the seven people interviewed by Politico, four were UAW members. The others included a county GOP official, a person who works at a nearby manufacturer and the father of an employee at the company where Trump was speaking. They said they had either been recruited by friends, co-workers and Republican elected officials to attend — or had simply walked in.

Most were diehard Trump fans, but a handful of the attendees said they were undecided.

Joe Cox, a UAW member who works as an engineer operator at a Stellantis site in Auburn Hills, Mich., was one of the undecided voters. He donned a black T-shirt emblazoned with the UAW logo and an eagle with wings colored with the American flag’s stripes and stars.

Cox said he voted for Trump in 2020, but he wants to see him back UAW more before committing to voting for him. “I am looking for his support in the union,” he said. “More action, less talk.”

He called Trump’s visit to Michigan “awesome,” but he said the fact that Trump was speaking in a non-union shop disappointed him somewhat. Trump’s history of attacking unions is “a little hurtful,” he said. “I’m working my fingers to the bone to support my family and I don’t think he knows what all goes into it.”

Trump may see an opening in part because of Biden’s rocky relationship with UAW president Shawn Fain.

Though UAW backed Biden in 2020, Fain announced that his union is withholding a 2024 endorsement for now because of the president’s handling of electric vehicle subsidies. Fain also publicly dismissed a speech Biden gave in Washington that was largely viewed as supportive of the union — and privately rebuffed Biden’s offer to send two of his top aides to Michigan earlier this month to help both sides reach a deal.

Trump repeatedly asked the audience to appeal to the leaders of the UAW for an endorsement.

“Your leadership should endorse and I won’t say a bad thing about them again,” Trump said. “They have to endorse Trump or else they’re committing suicide … committing suicide on the backs of your jobs. If you can speak to Shawn, say, ‘Shawn, endorse Trump and then you can take a nice two-month vacation.’”

But Democratic officials and people close to the union said that Biden’s visit to the picket line, which Fain explicitly asked for, has gone a long way toward smoothing things over.

Stevens said UAW officials told her that Biden’s visit “was a great day and they were thrilled to have the president there.”

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) greeted Biden at the airport with Fain. The Detroit-based congressman called the interactions between the two men “extremely pleasant and warm” and said he expects the union to endorse the president “in due course.”

He said Fain gifted Biden a UAW hat and jersey. Biden made a show of throwing his own baseball cap into his limousine and accepting the union gear, he said.

On Wednesday, the UAW echoed the Biden campaign’s talking points and put out a video on social media slamming Trump for what the union sees as his broken promise to save an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Fain has also been clear that Trump stands no chance of winning UAW’s endorsement, saying this week on CNN that the former president “serves a billionaire class.”

After three major elections that were good for Democrats in Michigan, some strategists on both sides of the aisle thought that the state was no longer in play in 2024. But this week demonstrates that it is very much seen as a top battleground by Trump and Biden, with the two campaigns airing ads and making visits there. Outside groups are also already getting involved.

Stevens said “it is very clear that the Republican Party in Michigan is beleaguered and belligerent.”

However, she acknowledged that Trump “can sometimes resonate with voters.”

“Michigan is very much still in play,” she said.

President Joe Biden’s historic stop today at a picket line outside a GM plant made clear just how much he views the union movement as critical, both to the state of the nation’s economy and his own political future.

Few presidents have so openly touted their pro-labor bonafides. No president has gone to these lengths to show them.

But is there another step he and the Democrats could take?

Some think so. Operatives within the ranks want the party to use the current rush of goodwill being directed toward striking United Auto Workers to reinvigorate momentum behind pro-union legislation. They note that the current moment is unique in modern political history, with leading Republicans, including Donald Trump, offering support for the striking workers. And while they aren’t Pollyanna-ish that this will result in their most ambitious legislative hopes becoming reality, they see opportunity in putting lawmakers on the record.

“Obviously I’d love the PRO Act, but even a vote on a resolution expressing support for UAW workers would be a valuable and elucidating endeavor,” Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and executive director of the labor-focused nonprofit media organization More Perfect Union, said in reference to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.

Asked if the Democratic-controlled Senate was cooking anything up, Shakir replied with a shrug emoji and a single word: “Trying.”

To Democrats, Republicans are opportunistically using the UAW strike to align themselves with workers without actually supporting pro-worker policies. And it’s becoming deeply agitating. On Tuesday morning, a researcher at the Democratic-allied think tank, Center for American Progress, blasted out an old video of Trump criticizing the unions in the midst of the Great Recession in 2008 — a sort of “hello folks!” type online missive.

“I think it would be important and powerful to force the Republicans who are posturing as friends of working people, to vote on the single most important piece of pro-worker legislation pending before Congress,” said SETH HARRIS, a former top labor adviser and deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council. “The truth is they are rabidly anti-union. They do not support workers … So I fully expect that every one of those people talking the talk, would not walk the walk.”

Biden allies also believe GOP lawmakers are trying to use the strike as a way to attack the administration’s electronic vehicle agenda while sidestepping questions about the union’s demands for wage increases, pension benefits and work week restructuring.

A vote could potentially separate the wheat from the chaff. But it would have to be called. And even union advisers aren’t bullish that Democratic leadership would pull that trigger.

That’s because few see Democratic unity on all these fronts.

Biden included the PRO Act, the Democrats’ seminal pro-union legislation, as part of his Build Back Better plan. But the bill, which would implement the greatest expansion of worker’s rights since the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, was ultimately left out of what became the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed on a party-line vote.

The legislation remains fiercely opposed by business groups. And it’s uncertain whether it could clear 50 votes in the Senate, as moderate Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema remain holdouts, let alone a filibuster-proof 60. Of course, with the House now in GOP control, it stands no chance of passage at all.

For its part, the White House believes the contrast between Biden and Republicans on the labor issue is already quite stark. Officials note that the president has continuously supported the PRO Act, again calling on lawmakerslast month to pass the legislation. The White House has also been pressing lawmakers to include some financial provisions from the PRO Act in a stopgap spending bill, namely increased fees for National Labor Relations Board violations.

The president’s stop on Tuesday was a continuation of a contrast the White House welcomes, with or without an additional vote.

“We’ve had too many presidents trying to crush unions — President Biden is here to make them stronger. He’s proud to be the most pro-union President. He’s proud that his signature legislation is creating good-paying union jobs for thousands of Americans,” said White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson. “And he’ll continue to push Republicans in Congress to pass the Pro-Act and make it easier for workers to organize.”

Nick Niedzwiadek contributed to this report.

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A major liberal group has drawn up a multimillion dollar plan to make Joe Biden cooler online. And the initiative has the blessing of a top White House official.

The organization, ProgressNow, is launching a $70 million project to help the president and down-ballot Democrats win the war for voters’ digital attention. The idea is to create, in their own words, an “echo chamber” on the left. At its heart, it is an effort to compete with one they say already operates on all cylinders on the right.

More broadly, it represents an important test of whether Democrats can successfully market the oldest president ever to an electorate that has consistently expressed reservations about his age and wished that another person would be the party’s standard-bearer, according to polls.

The center of ProgressNow’s plan is an app that the group has developed called Megaphone. Users who download the app can scroll through a series of liberal memes, videos and graphics created by the organization, add their own captions, and then quickly share them on social media platforms.

“ProgressNow has become an important partner to the groups supporting the Biden-Harris agenda,” said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser and top 2020 Biden strategist who added she was providing her comment in a personal capacity. Ramping up “ensures they will be in an even stronger position to deliver compelling digital communications to people in their communities through a grassroots network that effectively complements efforts in 2024 and beyond.”

Inherent in the ProgressNow strategy is the fact that liberals have been outmaneuvered online by the conservative movement for years, something the group’s leaders readily admit — and that more than a decade after formere President Barack Obama was supposed to have ushered in a new form of voter communication, the party has been uninventive under Biden.

To combat this, ProgressNow is hiring more than 65 new digital organizers across 10 battleground states to manage a band of volunteers who will be tasked with sharing the organization’s online content far and wide through Megaphone. By the fall of 2024, the group is looking to expand its grassroots army to 13,000 volunteers nationwide.

The group has already begun message-testing its efforts, revealing some unexpected details.

For example, the organization looked at a handful of social media graphics touting Biden’s handling of the economy, a critical weakness for him among voters. Staffers thought that a bright pink image that depicted a text message conversation — rather than graphics featuring photos of Biden himself — would perform better.

But social media users liked the content that pictured the president, alongside text that read “Bidenomics Prioritizes Working Families” and “Bidenomics Recovering the Economy Faster Than Ever.”

“Full disclaimer: That’s not the content that I thought was going to be the winner,” said Anna Scholl, president of ProgressNow. “What worked was both more words and more imagery of Biden.”

Scholl described the project’s digital volunteers who use the Megaphone app as “nano-influencers” — people who are “who are active in their local PTA and their church group.” They will serve as critical megaphones, she said, because voters have turned to those kinds of small-scale community leaders more as faith in the media and politicians plummet.

Scholl and other ProgressNow leaders said the investment is aimed at reaching people in today’s fragmented media landscape, who are increasingly turning to social media and streaming services for information, as well as more diverse communities. It also represents an attempt to shore up the president’s standing among young voters, who spend much of their time online.

“They’re getting their news and their information from what their friends and colleagues are posting and sharing on TikTok, on Instagram, on Facebook,” Scholl said. “They’re also trusting those folks as trusted messengers, far more than they’re trusting elected officials.”

ProgressNow, a nonprofit umbrella group founded in 2003 that attempts to boost progressive communications online, will also run digital ads and scale up its national operation. ProgressNow has 26 state affiliates, which also are 501c4 organizations and sometimes operate additional super PACs.

The group is singing from the same hymnal as the Biden campaign. In a memo earlier this year, the president’s reelection team identified breaking through the disjointed media environment as a top priority, saying that “while trust in the media may have eroded, trust in people’s personal networks has never been higher.”

ProgressNow’s operatives and donors said in interviews that they hope to fill a hole that’s long bedeviled them: Whereas the right has built a 24-7 attention-grabbing machine online as well as on TV and radio, Democrats have largely relied on paid advertising and traditional media organizations to get their message out. The problem, they argued, is that people are paying less attention to those spaces as they shift to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu — and news sites put up paywalls.

“The left has been getting outpaced online,” said Scholl. But, she added, “the goal of Megaphone is not to replicate the right-wing echo chamber infrastructure. It is to build our own echo chamber infrastructure.”

Democrats have lamented the far-right echo chamber for decades, and it’s a complaint that often flares up when the party is feeling more anxious.

The Strategic Victory Fund, an initiative of the leading donor group Democracy Alliance, is planning to raise the majority of the $70 million for the effort.

Scott Anderson, president of the Strategic Victory Fund, called Megaphone “the future of organizing.”

“What we’re trying to do here is to get in front of people with information in their feeds, allow them to become amplifiers in their own right, and to help try to drive the conversation in a way that doesn’t just require people to be face to face,” he said.

ProgressNow is targeting 10 states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Montana, Ohio and Minnesota. Almost all of them are presidential or Senate battlegrounds in 2024.

The Megaphone app will be available to its state affiliates and other outside groups that are helping elect Biden and Democrats down the ticket, including Future Forward, the super PAC elevated by the president’s aides, and America Votes, a liberal organization focused on turning out voters.

ProgressNow also plans to rigorously test the messages that it churns out on Megaphone to see what works and what doesn’t, data that could prove valuable in 2024. Oftentimes, the results are counterintuitive, as with the Biden graphic.

In last year’s midterms, ProgressNow piloted Megaphone in the key swing state of Michigan. The group’s researchers found that their target audience was extremely interested in astrology, so they made a digital ad boosting Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson that looked like a horoscope.

“See Today’s Horoscope,” it read. A few seconds later, more text popped up: “Renewing your vehicle tabs and updating your voter registration online is easier than ever thanks to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.”

“I’ve been in political communications for well over a decade. And if you told me that we’re going to build an astrology ad,” he wouldn’t have believed “that it would work,” said Lonnie Scott, ProgressNow’s interim managing director.

It ended up being the organization’s most successful advertisement in the state that cycle.

President Joe Biden received the updated Covid-19 vaccine, according to a memo from White House physician Kevin O’Connor released Saturday.

“As we enter the cold and flu season, the President encourages all Americans to follow his example and to check with their healthcare provider or pharmacist to assure that they are fully vaccinated,” O’Connor wrote in the memo.

The president received the Covid vaccine alongside the annual flu vaccine Friday, O’Connor wrote. First lady Jill Biden experienced “mild symptoms” when she contracted Covid earlier this month. The president tested negative.

The updated shot was approved by the FDA earlier this month and the CDC recommended it for all individuals six months and older — however, the rollout has been rocky.

With the federal government no longer purchasing and distributing the shot, logistical hiccups and confusion over insurance coverage have presented obstacles to people seeking the vaccine.

Covid hospitalization data published by the CDC show that virus levels have surged recently. However, the CDC stopped recording individual cases when the public health emergency ended in May, so the exact number of cases is uncertain.

The White House has also struggled to combat growing anti-vaccine sentiment in a polarized political environment.

Vaccine skepticism is increasingly pronounced in the GOP, polls show. A new POLITICO | Morning Consult poll showed that Republican voters were less likely than Democrats or independents to say vaccines are safe for children and only 27 percent of Republicans said the Covid vaccine is “very safe” for adults — while nearly as many, 23 percent, said it’s “very unsafe.”

GOP presidential candidates, in contrast to Biden, have disavowed the vaccine. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has said he regrets taking the vaccine (although his wife, a surgeon, has disagreed) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has leaned into Covid skepticism.

Biden’s primary challenger, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is also a prominent vaccine skeptic.

President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan to join the picket line of auto workers on strike nationwide, he said on Friday afternoon.

“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Biden wrote on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.

His decision to stand alongside the striking workers represents perhaps the most significant display of union solidarity ever by a sitting president.

The president’s plans come as some Democrats have begun to question his response to the strike, recognizing that he needs the full backing of union workers in his presidential reelection bid.

Earlier on Friday, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain announced that the strike would expand to more than three dozen additional locations across the country, rapidly expanding the union’s picket line that began at just three plants last Friday. Fain also asked Biden to join the workers on the picket line.

Former President Donald Trump also has plans to visit Michigan next week. Despite backlash from Fain, the leading candidate in the Republican presidential primary will visit current and former workers next Wednesday — the same day his competitors in the field take the debate stage in California.

Holly Otterbein and Sam Stein contributed to this report.

Former President Donald Trump is going to Detroit to try to make the case that he’s got the backs of striking autoworkers — but his record on labor issues has union advocates fuming all over again.

Trump has a long history of courting blue-collar workers both before and after his term in the White House, especially in denouncing plant closings and rewriting trade deals that he said had undermined U.S. manufacturing. But in some of those fights, he claimed credit for wins long before the results were clear — only for the labor side to lose in the end.

Trump took a victory lap, for example, when an electric vehicle manufacturer moved into a shuttered General Motors plant in Ohio in 2020, but the venture hit the skids earlier this year. He also browbeat Carrier Global Corp. to keep jobs in Indianapolis that the company had planned to move to Mexico, but hundreds of workers ended up being laid off anyway.

Meanwhile, his administration pursued policies that were hardly union-friendly — limiting employees’ rights to organize in certain types of workplaces and lowering the standard to rid workplaces of a union, for example. And when the UAW waged a six-week strike against GM in 2019, Trump mostly stayed silent, even as his administration quietly floated the possibility that he might intervene on the union’s behalf.

That may explain why his Detroit visit next week is getting such a chilly reception from nearly all union leaders, especially UAW President Shawn Fain — even as it’s unnerving Democrats who fear that, once again, Trump is outflanking them in appealing to Rust Belt workers bruised by the global economy.

The former president’s campaign believes these voters remain gettable, as they were in 2016 and again in 2020 — and that slicing away at President Joe Biden’s labor advantage is key to winning battleground states like Michigan. But those voters should pay attention to Trump’s actual record, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) told POLITICO.

“Donald Trump is full of nothing but broken promises, and Michigan’s autoworkers haven’t forgotten,” she said.

Asked for comment, a Trump spokesperson sent a long list of the former president’s economic accomplishments, saying his policies “created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs” and helped “bring back supply chains from overseas.”

These are some of the key episodes that shaped Trump’s history with labor unions and the auto industry, an issue now front and center in the 2024 campaign:

Claiming victory and moving on

Trump, who said during his inauguration speech that “rusted out factories” were “scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation,” has latched onto specific manufacturing plants and demanded they stay open. But that hasn’t always worked out in the long run.

Perhaps most notably, shortly after the 2016 election and even before he was sworn in as president, Trump spent weeks pressuring Carrier to keep workers at a plant in Indianapolis instead of moving them to Mexico.

The company eventually agreed after being offered state incentives, brokered by Trump and Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana.

But despite boasts that he had saved jobs and that the company would possibly even add more, the plant’s workforce — once about 1,400 people — was ultimately cut in half, according to Mike Millsap, United Steelworkers’ top elected officer in Indiana.

“Trump was just less than truthful throughout the whole thing with Carrier,” Millsap said in an interview. “He claimed he saved the plant.”

Carrier did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Two years later, Trump assailed General Motors’ decision to close an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The plant was sold and later reopened as part of an electric vehicle startup, an outcome Trump touted by showing off one of the company’s models — an electric pickup truck — at the White House.

But that company, Lordstown Motors, went bankrupt this year after production mishaps and other difficulties — rekindling economic uncertainty in the area just years after Trump said it was “booming.”

And in Wisconsin, Trump promised that the giant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, best known for making iPhones in China, would invest $10 billion to open a plant outside Milwaukee. “This is a great day for American workers and manufacturing and everyone who believes in the concept and label of ‘Made in the USA,’” Trump said during a White House appearance that included Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker.

However, the massive job payoff never arrived, though the company does employ some people in the area, The Washington Post reported last month.

Setbacks for unions

Despite Trump’s vocal efforts to keep domestic manufacturing jobs, his administration was far less friendly to U.S. workers seeking union representation.

“[W]hen it comes to the bread and butter issues our members care about — fair wages, safe jobsites, and the ability to retire with the dignity we earned — Donald Trump is just another fraud,” Mark McManus, the head of the plumbers union, said in a statement.

Trump’s appointees as the majority on the National Labor Relations Board limited workers’ rights to organize on employers’ property, as well as the scope of who should be included in particular bargaining units. Biden’s appointees to the NLRB have subsequently worked to dismantle much of the Trump board’s legacy.

“You can make all kinds of speeches, but do you sign up to protect the right to organize?” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said this week. “I’ll believe this economic populism when I see them [Republicans] do that.”

The Trump-led NLRB also lowered the standard needed for employers to oust an existing union and ruled in employers’ favor on setting handbook rules, a seemingly small issue but one that carries big implications for workplace standards.

The board under Trump further made it easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors, rather than employees, meaning those workers could no longer be covered by the law protecting employees’ rights to organize or collectively bargain.

The rebirth of protectionism

Much of Trump’s trade policy was aimed at creating more auto jobs in the United States. That included renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he blamed for massive U.S. manufacturing job losses, and a separate free trade agreement with South Korea.

Moves like that earned Trump some praise even from critics of his overall record.

“I think he’s going in the right direction on trade,” Richard Trumka, then-president of the AFL-CIO, told reporters in 2018.

Trump’s U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, used the threat of withdrawing from the agreement with South Korea to force Seoul to accept new auto terms aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit in that sector.

Trump also imposed a 25-percent tariff on auto imports from China, a move that has helped prevent Chinese electric vehicle makers from getting a toehold in the U.S. market.

Trump sees the U.S. trade deficit as a sign that other countries are beating the United States, and he took many of his trade actions with the aim of reducing the imbalance.

During the current campaign, he has talked about imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports to help level the playing field and to give the United States more negotiating leverage.

That plan would cut both ways for the auto sector. Higher tariffs on imported automobiles would provide a price cushion for cars made in the United States. But automakers would have to pay more for imported parts, increasing their costs.

In addition, the move would most likely violate World Trade Organization rules and inflame relations with trading partners.

That’s what happened in 2018, when Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum in the name of national security. The move, which was later declared illegal by the WTO, provided steel and aluminum workers with a shield against foreign competition but boosted costs for other sectors, such as autos, that rely on the metals.

The NAFTA re-do

Trump also used the threat of withdrawal in the NAFTA renegotiation, which Trump renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The USMCA included tougher auto “rules-of-origin” requiring cars manufactured in Canada and Mexico to contain more North American steel, aluminum and other material to qualify for a waiver of the duty that the United States imposes on passenger car imports.

The new rules also included a novel provision aimed at increasing the wages of Mexican autoworkers to make it less advantageous for automakers to make cars in that country to export to the United States.

Before leaving office, Lighthizer implemented the new USMCA auto rules in a way that both Mexico and Canada said was even tighter than what they had agreed to. The Biden administration has stayed the course in this area — a rare policy nexus between the current and former president — despite protests from the United States’ North American neighbors.

The USMCA does appear to have helped reduce the U.S. trade deficit in passenger cars with Canada and Mexico.

But that decline was more than offset by an increased deficit in the two other areas: auto parts and big vehicles. The overall automotive trade deficit — which includes auto parts, passenger cars, trucks, buses and specialty vehicles — totaled nearly $100 billion in 2022, compared with the 2017 level of $83 billion before Trump tinkered with the pact.

Jasper Goodman contributed to this report. 

Former President Donald Trump is going to Detroit to try to make the case that he’s got the backs of striking autoworkers — but his record on labor issues has union advocates fuming all over again.

Trump has a long history of courting blue-collar workers both before and after his term in the White House, especially in denouncing plant closings and rewriting trade deals that he said had undermined U.S. manufacturing. But in some of those fights, he claimed credit for wins long before the results were clear — only for the labor side to lose in the end.

Trump took a victory lap, for example, when an electric vehicle manufacturer moved into a shuttered General Motors plant in Ohio in 2020, but the venture hit the skids earlier this year. He also browbeat Carrier Global Corp. to keep jobs in Indianapolis that the company had planned to move to Mexico, but hundreds of workers ended up being laid off anyway.

Meanwhile, his administration pursued policies that were hardly union-friendly — limiting employees’ rights to organize in certain types of workplaces and lowering the standard to rid workplaces of a union, for example. And when the UAW waged a six-week strike against GM in 2019, Trump mostly stayed silent, even as his administration quietly floated the possibility that he might intervene on the union’s behalf.

That may explain why his Detroit visit next week is getting such a chilly reception from nearly all union leaders, especially UAW President Shawn Fain — even as it’s unnerving Democrats who fear that, once again, Trump is outflanking them in appealing to Rust Belt workers bruised by the global economy.

The former president’s campaign believes these voters remain gettable, as they were in 2016 and again in 2020 — and that slicing away at President Joe Biden’s labor advantage is key to winning battleground states like Michigan. But those voters should pay attention to Trump’s actual record, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) told POLITICO.

“Donald Trump is full of nothing but broken promises, and Michigan’s autoworkers haven’t forgotten,” she said.

Asked for comment, a Trump spokesperson sent a long list of the former president’s economic accomplishments, saying his policies “created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs” and helped “bring back supply chains from overseas.”

These are some of the key episodes that shaped Trump’s history with labor unions and the auto industry, an issue now front and center in the 2024 campaign:

Claiming victory and moving on

Trump, who said during his inauguration speech that “rusted out factories” were “scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation,” has latched onto specific manufacturing plants and demanded they stay open. But that hasn’t always worked out in the long run.

Perhaps most notably, shortly after the 2016 election and even before he was sworn in as president, Trump spent weeks pressuring Carrier to keep workers at a plant in Indianapolis instead of moving them to Mexico.

The company eventually agreed after being offered state incentives, brokered by Trump and Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana.

But despite boasts that he had saved jobs and that the company would possibly even add more, the plant’s workforce — once about 1,400 people — was ultimately cut in half, according to Mike Millsap, United Steelworkers’ top elected officer in Indiana.

“Trump was just less than truthful throughout the whole thing with Carrier,” Millsap said in an interview. “He claimed he saved the plant.”

Carrier did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Two years later, Trump assailed General Motors’ decision to close an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The plant was sold and later reopened as part of an electric vehicle startup, an outcome Trump touted by showing off one of the company’s models — an electric pickup truck — at the White House.

But that company, Lordstown Motors, went bankrupt this year after production mishaps and other difficulties — rekindling economic uncertainty in the area just years after Trump said it was “booming.”

And in Wisconsin, Trump promised that the giant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, best known for making iPhones in China, would invest $10 billion to open a plant outside Milwaukee. “This is a great day for American workers and manufacturing and everyone who believes in the concept and label of ‘Made in the USA,’” Trump said during a White House appearance that included Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker.

However, the massive job payoff never arrived, though the company does employ some people in the area, The Washington Post reported last month.

Setbacks for unions

Despite Trump’s vocal efforts to keep domestic manufacturing jobs, his administration was far less friendly to U.S. workers seeking union representation.

“[W]hen it comes to the bread and butter issues our members care about — fair wages, safe jobsites, and the ability to retire with the dignity we earned — Donald Trump is just another fraud,” Mark McManus, the head of the plumbers union, said in a statement.

Trump’s appointees as the majority on the National Labor Relations Board limited workers’ rights to organize on employers’ property, as well as the scope of who should be included in particular bargaining units. Biden’s appointees to the NLRB have subsequently worked to dismantle much of the Trump board’s legacy.

“You can make all kinds of speeches, but do you sign up to protect the right to organize?” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said this week. “I’ll believe this economic populism when I see them [Republicans] do that.”

The Trump-led NLRB also lowered the standard needed for employers to oust an existing union and ruled in employers’ favor on setting handbook rules, a seemingly small issue but one that carries big implications for workplace standards.

The board under Trump further made it easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors, rather than employees, meaning those workers could no longer be covered by the law protecting employees’ rights to organize or collectively bargain.

The rebirth of protectionism

Much of Trump’s trade policy was aimed at creating more auto jobs in the United States. That included renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he blamed for massive U.S. manufacturing job losses, and a separate free trade agreement with South Korea.

Moves like that earned Trump some praise even from critics of his overall record.

“I think he’s going in the right direction on trade,” Richard Trumka, then-president of the AFL-CIO, told reporters in 2018.

Trump’s U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, used the threat of withdrawing from the agreement with South Korea to force Seoul to accept new auto terms aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit in that sector.

Trump also imposed a 25-percent tariff on auto imports from China, a move that has helped prevent Chinese electric vehicle makers from getting a toehold in the U.S. market.

Trump sees the U.S. trade deficit as a sign that other countries are beating the United States, and he took many of his trade actions with the aim of reducing the imbalance.

During the current campaign, he has talked about imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports to help level the playing field and to give the United States more negotiating leverage.

That plan would cut both ways for the auto sector. Higher tariffs on imported automobiles would provide a price cushion for cars made in the United States. But automakers would have to pay more for imported parts, increasing their costs.

In addition, the move would most likely violate World Trade Organization rules and inflame relations with trading partners.

That’s what happened in 2018, when Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum in the name of national security. The move, which was later declared illegal by the WTO, provided steel and aluminum workers with a shield against foreign competition but boosted costs for other sectors, such as autos, that rely on the metals.

The NAFTA re-do

Trump also used the threat of withdrawal in the NAFTA renegotiation, which Trump renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The USMCA included tougher auto “rules-of-origin” requiring cars manufactured in Canada and Mexico to contain more North American steel, aluminum and other material to qualify for a waiver of the duty that the United States imposes on passenger car imports.

The new rules also included a novel provision aimed at increasing the wages of Mexican autoworkers to make it less advantageous for automakers to make cars in that country to export to the United States.

Before leaving office, Lighthizer implemented the new USMCA auto rules in a way that both Mexico and Canada said was even tighter than what they had agreed to. The Biden administration has stayed the course in this area — a rare policy nexus between the current and former president — despite protests from the United States’ North American neighbors.

The USMCA does appear to have helped reduce the U.S. trade deficit in passenger cars with Canada and Mexico.

But that decline was more than offset by an increased deficit in the two other areas: auto parts and big vehicles. The overall automotive trade deficit — which includes auto parts, passenger cars, trucks, buses and specialty vehicles — totaled nearly $100 billion in 2022, compared with the 2017 level of $83 billion before Trump tinkered with the pact.

Jasper Goodman contributed to this report. 

When Tom Perez returned to the White House earlier this summer, he did not anticipate spending so much of his time focused on the state of New York and its response to a surge of migrants. But his job — director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs — is largely about solving problems, wherever they crop up.

Senior administration officials have come to think of Perez as something of a “utility infielder,” an experienced hand who can play a different role every day. He can be advising the team monitoring the United Auto Workers strike, helping agencies implement policy or offering input on political strategy, all while constantly working his two cell phones.

A former Labor secretary in the Obama administration and chair of the DNC, Perez has been convening meetings twice a week with New York city and state officials while coordinating responses to the migrant influx from several government agencies, he said in an interview last Friday. The previous day, he’d traveled to New York to meet with Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul, both of whom have been critical of the White House’s approach to the crisis.

“Kathy Hochul and I have each other on speed dial, and I appreciate that — she’s working her tail off,” said Perez, who also met last week with philanthropists, business leaders, service providers and immigration lawyers, securing commitments from the private sector to hire migrants as soon as they become legally eligible to work. “This job involves collaboration at scale: collaboration within the West Wing of the White House, collaboration with our agency partners, collaboration with state and local elected officials, with faith leaders, business leaders.”

Hochul, who’s known the “Buffalo native” Perez for decades, returned the praise.

“Our frequent conversations and his engagement with my staff — in person and remotely — has made a huge difference and we have more to do,” she told West Wing Playbook.

Perez’s role inside the White House was, at the start, tricky to define. He had run and lost a campaign to become governor of Maryland and, more than anything else, seemed to need a new place within the Democratic infrastructure. He was given a portfolio that included the role of “senior adviser.” While less narrowly defined, it allowed Perez to deploy his experience in several areas, in addition to directing the OIA and engaging with elected officials in all 50 states.

“If people are looking for linear job descriptions, this is probably not that kind of job,” he said.

On Monday, Perez traveled to Ohio for an event focused on workforce development. Earlier this month, he flew to Los Angeles to meet with Mayor Karen Bass about homelessness. He toured Skid Row, as well as the Port of Los Angeles to discuss new investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

In the days and weeks following the Maui wildfires, he spoke several times a day with Hawaii Gov. Josh Green. “He’s far and away the most responsive person I’ve ever worked with in the federal government,” said Green, who credited Perez’s engagement for getting almost immediate approval of Hawaii’s request for a federal disaster declaration. “He understands what we’ve gone through.”

Ensconced in his second floor corner office directly above the Oval, Perez has taken on a broad portfolio that extends beyond crisis response. He is working with HHS officials to ensure Medicaid recipients aren’t automatically bumped from the rolls for failing to return renewal documentation. He has engaged with local leaders across the country about extreme heat. He hosted a White House Childcare Convening in July, and he is trying to make sure states and cities, as well as businesses, are taking advantage of opportunities from the Inflation Reduction Act.

And in recent days he has been advising Gene Sperling and others about the ongoing UAW strike. Sperling was designated as the administration’s lead on the negotiations before Perez returned to the White House. Perez, while praising Sperling as “remarkably well qualified” for the assignment, acknowledged he’s been “providing help and counsel behind the scenes,” noting that he’d met with Sperling last Friday morning just hours after the UAW began its strike.

“This is an all hands on deck moment, and I do have some relationships in the labor movement that are helpful,” Perez said.

“When I can pick up the phone and call someone with whom I’ve been working with for 10-15 years … having those relationships at a state, federal and local level, knowing how agencies work, it just gives me a leg up in being able to play a meaningful role on a wide range of issues.”

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