CHICAGO—For a guy who proclaims himself the tribune of the working class, especially white male factory workers, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump can put his foot in his mouth about them. That’s what he did in Chicago.
Sharply questioned by Bloomberg News’s top editor, before a capacity crowd of corporate chieftains —paying appropriately high sums to listen—at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump compared workers assembling cars to kids pulling parts of toys out of boxes and putting them together.
“You know what they really are?” Trump asked rhetorically about autoworkers—all autoworkers, not just unionized ones. The automakers, he said, “build everything in Germany and Mexico and they only assemble it here.
“They get away with murder because they say ‘Oh, yes, we are building cars!’ They don’t build cars. They take them [parts] out of a box and assemble them. We could have our child do it.”
Needless to say, Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, whose union has endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and is campaigning strongly for her in the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin and extending its legions elsewhere, jumped on Trump.
Never worked a real job
“Donald Trump is a billionaire who’s never worked a real job in his life,” said Fain, who joined the union when he started as an electrician for Chrysler in Kokomo, Ind. “He doesn’t know the first thing about hard work, and he wouldn’t last a day in an auto plant.
“He isn’t fit to be an autoworker, and he certainly isn’t fit to be the president. Trump doesn’t understand us, he doesn’t respect us, and he certainly doesn’t represent us. Trump doesn’t care about autoworkers. The only thing Donald Trump wants from autoworkers is a vote. Donald Trump is a scab!”
The rest of Trump’s answers about cars was a convoluted appeal to blue-collar workers by promising to bring factories and jobs back to the U.S. by raising tariffs on foreign manufactured goods, cars included, to extremely high levels, from $100 to $1000 or more per item.
That would convince foreign firms to build factories in the U.S. to avoid the tariffs, he claimed. Trump shrugged off facts his Bloomberg questioner presented—that foreign firms would pass on tariff costs to U.S. consumers, that more than a fourth of all U.S. jobs depend on imports and that you can’t just build an auto factory overnight—by declaring that “you’ve just been plain wrong for 25 years.”
Trump declared that without the high tariffs, even higher than percentages he pushes on the campaign trail, “Michigan would be dead. South Carolina would be dead.” Michigan is the home state of Ford, GM and Stellantis, once FiatChrysler. BMW has at least 10,000 non-union workers in its Spartanburg, S.C., factory. And 501-1000 toil in a Mercedes-Benz van plant in Ladson, a Charleston suburb. Total UAW membership at the Detroit-based automakers is around 150,000.
The Trump clip is can be viewed here. Fain invited viewers to respond with tweets and clips and promised to post the replies on the UAW’s feed. Even before the UAW chief’s statement, replies started rolling in. Most slammed Trump. Many were not fit to print.
One, tweeting under a pseudonym, suggested Teamsters view the clip, too. That union is one of two big unions staying neutral in the presidential race, but many of its locals and large districts—whose leaders really decide where to put money and people—endorsed Harris.
“He could NOT do the job of an autoworker, or a multitude of other jobs,” UAW District 4 President Brandon Campbell tweeted about Trump. “He doesn’t have the mental capacity, any experience with physical labor, and we should never forget his terribly difficult battle with bone spurs!!” which Trump used to escape military service in the Indochina War.
“2 scenarios: 1. Donald Trump trying to work an auto assembly line 2. A UAW member sitting in the Oval Office. Odds are the UAW member will do a much better job at the desk than Trump would on the line. So again…. Which job is easier?” tweeted author and screenwriter Lee Goff.
“I worked the production line at BMW in Munich in Germany in 1991 when I was a college student,” tweeted John Whelan, a department head at Santander. “It’s physically demanding hard work. That lad ain’t ever done a hard day’s work in his life.”
“Americans are starting to see exactly what he is. #UAW. I’d wager Trump has never built anything with his own tiny, weak hands in his entire putrid existence. #Labor #UnionStrong,” tweeted Greg Pettine.
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