Opinion | Who Really Stands With American Workers?

There was a lot of breathless speculation before Tuesday’s presidential primaries in Michigan, but the actual results didn’t clarify the two most important questions: How many “uncommitted” voters angry about President Biden’s approach to the war in Gaza will abstain in November, even though Donald Trump would surely be much more supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden? And how many blue-collar workers will support Trump in the false belief that he’s on their side?

But we can at least say with certainty that Trump is not now and never has been pro-worker — while Biden is.

Naturally, that’s not the way Trump tells the story. In September, during an autoworkers’ strike, Trump, addressing workers at a nonunion Michigan auto parts factory, declared that he had saved an auto industry that was “on its knees, gasping its last breaths” when he took office. The day before, by contrast, Biden joined union workers on the picket line.

This is, however, pure self-aggrandizing fantasy. When Trump took office, the auto industry had already regained most of the ground it had lost during the Great Recession. This recovery was possible because in 2009, the Obama-Biden administration stepped in to rescue the major auto companies. At the time, many Republicans vehemently opposed that bailout.

What about Trump personally? He flip-flopped, first endorsing the bailout, then years later siding with the Republican right in denouncing it, saying, “You could have let it” — the auto industry — “go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself.” He once floated the idea of automakers moving production out of Michigan to lower-wage locations and then eventually move back “because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.” If you don’t quite get the meaning there, he was in effect suggesting busting the auto unions so that workers would be forced to accept pay cuts. Populism!

Once in office, Trump, who campaigned as a different kind of Republican, mostly governed as a standard conservative. His promises to rebuild America’s infrastructure — which drew pushback from Republicans in Congress — became a running joke. His biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut that was a big giveaway to corporations and high-income Americans. His attempt at health care “reform” would have gutted Obamacare without any workable replacement, causing millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage.