Donald Trump, in an August 30, 2023 video statement entitled, “What’s Happening to Our Auto Workers is an Absolute Disgrace,” declared:

“So, to every auto worker, I stand in total solidarity with you in your fight against Joe Biden’s job-killing Green New Deal insanity. When I am your President, I will deliver higher wages for auto workers, I will  protect your jobs, I will end Joe Biden’s catastrophic electric vehicle mandate…On day one you are going to be back in business with me, and those factories are going to start opening up again.”

LaRouchePAC organizers have been distributing Trump's earlier message to auto workers at Detroit area auto plants and have found dramatic support from layers that are supposed to be solidly Democratic. Trump's new remarks up the ante and weigh in hard against Biden’s “outlandish requirement that 67 percent of all new cars must be electric in less than 10 years,” and he delivered them just as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Big Three automakers enter their final weeks of contract negotiations. The transition to electric vehicles is one of the major points of contention, along with demands to roll back the cuts in wages and job security which came after the 2008 near-death experience for the auto industry (a near-death experience from which the auto companies have long recovered).

UAW President Shawn Fain has stated that the push for electric vehicles, which bring with them much lower paying and far fewer jobs, is a “race to the bottom.” It is one of the reasons the UAW has not endorsed Joe Biden, unlike every other major union. 

But on August 31, Fain decided to dance with the devil, and praised the Biden Administration for a multi-billion grant for electric vehicle conversion, because it includes language that “the EV transition must include strong union partnerships.”  His statement concludes, ““The UAW looks forward to continue working with the Biden Administration to ensure a just transition for the auto workers in this country.”

Trump must have seen that coming, warning in his statement, issued the day before, “There’s no such thing as a fair transition that destroys over 100,000 auto manufacturing jobs and it will be much more than that. Wastes $10 billions of dollars that should be going to the workers and makes new cars entirely unaffordable for the middle class.” 

And he’s right. Biden’s forced march to EV has nothing to do with the future viability of a new technology. It is part of the calculated destruction of our manufacturing base, our energy independence, our productive workforce and our economic sovereignty, all under the umbrella of a global elite which wants you to own nothing and be happy. Today’s battery and EV production facilities pay about half of UAW union scale wages and no amount of collective bargaining is going to significantly change that. The UAW recently settled a strike at an Ohio battery plant, where the negotiated wage increase tops out at $22/hr (union scale starts at $33/hr). So the jobs that are left will pay far lower than the amount needed to raise a family, and there will be about 100,000 fewer of them.

In contrast to Biden’s Green New Deal insanity, Trump called for the construction of “hundreds and hundreds of new power plants,” at the same time that he issued this statement about auto workers. This is the kind of nation-building policy which will generate high-paying productive jobs and will drastically bring down the cost of everything by supplying cheap and plentiful energy. 

The choice is clear, and Donald Trump minced no words: “vote for Trump, because if we don’t win this election, our country, not only in terms of auto workers, our country will go to hell.”