DETROIT—Former Republican Oval Office occupant Donald Trump’s “dope” insult on social media has led Auto Workers President Shawn Fain to jump to the defense of the union’s endorsement of Democrat Joe Biden—by retorting Trump is a capitalist class tool for oppressing workers.
And it can be fairly said that Fain, UAW president for only the last nine months, won the war of words with Trump, the former criminal and rapist White House denizen who tries to count working class people like auto workers as a key political constituency that belongs to him.
Trump seems to think UAW members will overlook his anti-labor track record, along with his actions molesting women, inciting an insurrection to keep himself in power or getting indicted on 91 criminal counts in four separate state and federal trials, and vote for him for president this fall.
While Trump, as usual, heaped belittling insults on Fain on his Truth Social platform, Fain fought back with facts on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. He compared Trump’s trashing of workers and unions and his record as a capitalist tool with Biden’s pro-union stands.
And Fain pitted unions in general and the UAW in particular on the side of the working class versus Trump as a tribune of “the billionaire class.” It’s a theme Fain’s sounded before, but then the car companies were his targets as part of that larger grouping.
Trump started the verbal donnybrook after learning of UAW’s rousing endorsement of Biden, unveiled at its Legislative-Political Conference in D.C., after a unanimous vote of its board, whose members, like Fain, were popularly elected.
“Shawn Fain is a Weapon of Mass Destruction on Auto Workers and the Automobile Manufacturing Industry in the United States!” Trump declared.
“Get rid of this Dope!” he urged UAW.
Trump could not explain the remark
Trump did not explain his “weapon of mass destruction” charge in his tweet, but he’s denounced Fain and UAW for agreeing to manufacture electric vehicles in the future instead of only fossil fuel-powered cars, trucks, and SUVs.
Like other Republicans and their corporate puppeteers, Trump disses global warming from fossil fuels. UAW, like Biden, doesn’t. In its new contracts with Ford, GM, and Stellantis—formerly FiatChrysler—UAW agreed to company plans to build electric vehicles, but forced all of them to be union-made.
Indeed, one whole session of the union’s D.C. conference was devoted to the “green economy,” the need to abandon fossil fuels, and the millions of good union jobs that could result from conversion.
Fain didn’t talk EVs in his retort to Trump. He talked class vs. class.
“It’s a perfect contrast between the two candidates,” Fain said. “I mean, you have, for the first time in history, a sitting U.S. president joining working-class people, joining the workers on the picket line, standing up with them.” Biden walked with, and addressed, UAW picketers in Michigan.
“And you had Donald Trump, who claims he supports the workers, who calls one of his business owner buddies in a non-union factory, and he goes to this non-union factory and has a rally claiming that he’s there for the union workers and the striking workers.”
That was a reference to Trump traveling to a non-union parts supplier, also in Michigan, a key swing state, the same day Biden walked the picket line with UAW nearer Detroit. Trump’s rally featured, as a backdrop, the non-union workers waving signs reading a lie: “Auto Workers for Trump.”
“It’s what Trump does best. It’s a rope-a-dope,” Fain continued. “He wants you to look over here while over here, he’s taking everything away. I mean, it’s the divide-and-conquer tactic, and that’s what’s worked for the billionaire class and the corporate class forever.’
After citing the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts for corporations and the rich as an example—Fain called their benefits to workers “minuscule”—the UAW chief added: “Labor is going to lead this (class) fight, and we’re in it.
“Our members have to look at the reality. We have to look at facts. That’s why our contract campaign was so successful, because we put the facts out there of the gross inequality between the companies and the workers, and it’s the same situation in our politics.
“There is gross inequality with the few at the top, and everyone else at the bottom. We have to look at facts, not fiction, not alternative facts or lies, as Trump likes to talk about, real facts. And the facts are very clear.”
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