How Trump Failed Workers
Last week, The New York Times reported that former President Donald Trump plans on skipping the second GOP debate on September 27 by flying to Detroit and “injecting himself into the labor dispute between striking autoworkers and the nation’s leading auto manufacturers.”
Trump will take the side of United Auto Workers, hiding behind them from his rivals in the process. It is a clever, if craven, play.
However, it could also provide an opportunity for his critics – Republicans and Democrats – to highlight the difference between Trump’s rhetoric and record regarding economic nationalism, a central aspect of the myth of Trump as a populist tribune. Indeed, though it’s all but forgotten now, Trump rowed in the past with labor on that very issue. That’s why UAW President Shawn Fain isn’t excited about his visit.
In a statement to The New York Times, Fain said that “every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.” Trump has been critical of Fain, essentially blaming him for the woes of auto workers. It’s not the first time he’s done this. Trump also tried to blame Dave Green, then the president of the UAW local in Lordstown, Ohio, for the shuttering of a General Motors plant there while he was president.
But to understand the Ohio fight and Trump’s broader failure as a self-styled economic nationalist, you have to revisit the Michigan rally that took place in September 2020. There, Trump touted imaginary achievements for auto workers and demanded their support in the upcoming presidential election.
“You better vote for me, I got you so many damn car plants,” he said. “We brought you a lot of car plants, we brought you a lot ... and we’re going to bring you a lot more.”
When he delivered that speech outside Saginaw, only five new auto assembly plants had been announced to open since Trump took office in 2017, according to the Center for Automotive Research. Of those five, the Detroit Free Press reported, only one new major facility had been announced for Michigan.
A few days later, in Ohio, where Trump also said new factories were being built, General Motors was ordered to pay back $28 million in tax credits after it closed a major facility without honoring its agreement to retain jobs through 2028. No new plants opened in Ohio during his presidency.
Green appeared on Fox News to discuss the situation. He remarked that Trump merely tweeting that the factory shouldn’t close because “the economy is so good” wasn’t helpful. That was when Trump retaliated by suggesting Green was at fault. “Democrat UAW Local 1112 President David Green ought to get his act together and produce,” he tweeted after the segment.
UAW members were surprised and confused by Trump’s salvo.
“My initial reaction was, ‘That’s odd,’” one union representative told BuzzFeed News. “I wonder why he called out Dave Green of all people. … There’s no blame to be had there for lack of a product, or lack of an agreement, or lack of sales.”
Trump reportedly even considered paying Green a visit. Instead, in his characteristic bark-not-bite fashion, Trump continued attacking from afar, suggesting while in Lima, Ohio, that if only they had lowered unions dues, people like Green “could’ve kept General Motors. They could’ve kept it in that gorgeous plant at Lordstown.” It was an absurd assertion.
Trump knows his economic record is not all it’s cracked up to be, and he would rather throw workers under the bus than admit that.
Investment in auto manufacturing, for example, was higher during the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency than it was during the first three of Trump’s, an analysis by the Center for Automotive Research found. Trump even tried to take credit for deals negotiated by Obama, such as Ford’s proposal to invest $1.2 billion in Michigan.
“Big announcement by Ford today,” he tweeted in March 2017. “Major investment to be made in three Michigan plants. Car companies coming back to U.S. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!”
But Ford had struck that deal in 2015 as part of a collective bargaining agreement with UAW. A spokeswoman for the company confirmed to the press in a statement that the “majority” of what Trump claimed credit for was “part of the 2015 UAW contract.”
There’s a familiar pattern here: Trump takes credit for things he did not do or is only partially responsible for while wildly exaggerating or outright lying about his achievements to distract from his shortcomings and failures. And it applies to more than car plants.
In 2016, Trump promised the people of Erie County, Pennsylvania, that he would return manufacturing to the region. By March 2020, Erie County had “19,000 manufacturing jobs, fewer than when Trump took office and the smallest number since 2010, when the U.S. was still recovering from the Great Recession,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, citing figures from Federal Reserve Economic Data. “When you hear that Trump is bragging about the economy, I know better – it’s not trickling down to the workers at all. It’s staying in the boardrooms,” a local machinist said.
A similar story played out in Wisconsin, where Trump announced in 2017 plans for a $10 billion factory to be built by Foxconn that would provide 13,000 jobs.
Trump said it would be “the eighth wonder of the world.” It never happened. By 2021, Foxconn had largely abandoned the ambitious project. It was an expensive failure. The Washington Post reported that “local and state governments spent roughly $500 million to buy land, bulldoze houses and build infrastructure for an unfulfilled manufacturing megasite that was supposed to include dozens of futuristic buildings and a factory to produce flat-panel displays for televisions.”
As of today, Foxconn employs not 13,000 but just 1,000 people at the location, where partially used buildings are occasionally rented out for events. The head of a local government watchdog group described it as “a low-rent Epcot Center.”
Meanwhile, offshoring continued apace. An analysis of data by Bloomberg from the U.S. Department of Labor on applications for Trade Adjustment Assistance, a federal assistance program for workers displaced by the effects of trade, showed more petitions were filed in the first three-and-a-half years of Trump’s presidency than were filed during an equivalent period under Obama’s second term. In other words, offshoring accelerated under the president who promised to slow or stop it.
The most powerful myths combine kernels of truth with the aspirations and anxieties of a people. They become realer than reality when they reflect how we wish things were and could be rather than how they are actually. Trump spoke to the anxieties and aspirations of Americans who felt left behind, promising “the eighth wonder of the world.” He did deliver on some things. But on balance, he failed to live up to his own hype.
Now, only the myth remains.