Donald Trump has long made it clear that he sees himself as not just the true voice of the working class, but also the rightful standard-bearer of the union vote. His rally Wednesday night in a Detroit, Michigan suburb just reconfirmed that. “Tell your UAW leadership — no problems with them — but they have to endorse Trump because if they don’t, all they’re doing is committing suicide,” he said. He was talking to a crowd of auto workers, some unionized, but mostly not, at a nonunion manufacturing plant about why he deserves both the union vote and the support of auto workers in general.
This is the crux of Wednesday’s rally: Trump doesn’t care about the specific demands of the striking United Auto Workers members — he wants their votes, and because he says he supports manufacturing jobs and opposes electric vehicle development, that should be enough to back him. But union voters, including in Michigan, have long sided with Democratic candidates — UAW’s leadership itself refused to meet with Trump but joined President Joe Biden 50 miles away a day earlier, when he became the first sitting president to join a picket line.
Trump’s track record with unions isn’t as simple as he’d like to paint it. Though he spent much of the 2016 campaign railing against free trade deals and neoliberal economic policies that contributed to the decline of the American manufacturing sector and the outsourcing of blue-collar jobs, that’s just about the limit of his union-friendly perspective. As president, he sided with capital and managerial interests over labor at nearly every turn, appointing corporate-friendly lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board, supporting right-to-work laws that limited union organizing and dues collections in Republican states, and promising to veto the PRO Act, a bill that would override those state laws and boost labor organizing rights. Even at his rally, he talked up the tax cuts he passed in 2017, without…
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