“Very stupid people.” It’s one of Donald Trump’s favorite insults, an insistence that he alone understands what all the fools don’t. In a speech Wednesday night at a nonunion auto parts company in Michigan, the former president made clear that he thinks autoworkers and those in the communities that depend on car manufacturing are very stupid people.
And if they believe what Trump is trying to sell them, he’ll be right.
It will surprise no one to learn that Trump’s speech was peppered with fables and lies.
Coming to Michigan in the midst of a United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three car companies was a bit awkward for Trump, whose administration was venomously anti-union and who has been waging a war of words with UAW President Shawn Fain. So he arrived at a strategy to dismiss the strike and the autoworkers’ demands as irrelevant, while making fantastical promises if he were to be restored to power.
It will surprise no one to learn that Trump’s speech was peppered with fables and lies. He claimed that he “saved the auto industry from extinction.” In fact, auto manufacturing employment fell during Trump’s presidency, even before the temporary crash during the Covid pandemic. Under President Joe Biden, employment rebounded, and today there are 60,000 more workers in the industry than there were at the peak of the Trump years.
Jobs are only part of the story, however; the autoworkers are striking for better wages, improved retirement benefits and the elimination of wage “tiers” that give new employees worse pay, among other things. Trump claimed that those demands are meaningless unless he gets elected. “Your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think,” he said. “You’re striking for wages but you know your job’s only going to be here for two years, three years if you’re lucky.”
Why is that? Because the Biden administration is promoting electric vehicles. “It makes no difference what you get” in a deal with the car companies, Trump said, because “all of these cars will be manufactured in foreign lands.” But the UAW doesn’t oppose the transition to EVs. The reality that Trump (and other Republicans) refuse to acknowledge is that the EV transition is happening whether anyone likes it or not; the question is whether those cars will be built in the United States and whether they’ll be built by union labor.
Which is precisely why the Biden administration, through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, has sought to spur the development of the EV industry in the United States. In some ways, it’s already working; look, for instance, at the rapidly developing “battery belt” for manufacturing batteries for EVs, thanks in no small part to Biden’s industrial policy.
If Trump becomes president again, he can put all the tariffs he wants on Chinese vehicles, but that won’t stop the worldwide transition to EVs.
Trump seems to want that all to wither away, or at least be confined to a few narrowly defined uses. What would be left is an auto industry that abandons all its plans for the EV transition — and the vehicles it’s already making like the Ford F-150 Lightning (which is so popular Ford can’t build them fast enough) — to manufacture only internal combustion cars, and let other countries, especially China, meet the world’s demand for EVs. How that’s supposed to help autoworkers is unclear.
But Trump had an answer: Elect him, he said, and “I will take you to new heights never dreamed of before.” Union leaders “have to endorse Trump, because if they don’t, all they’re doing is committing suicide.” So those are the options: paradise if Trump is elected, catastrophe if he isn’t.
If voters in Michigan are wondering what that kind of promise is worth, they might ask people in the coal fields of Appalachia. Visiting West Virginia in 2016, Trump said, “For those miners, get ready, because you’re going to be working your asses off!” You’ll never guess what happened: Those miners didn’t go back to work. When Trump came into office, there were about 51,000 jobs in the entire coal industry. When he left, the number had fallen to 38,000. The decline wasn’t because Trump neglected to promote coal; his attacks on environmental protection were unceasing. The problem was that the threats to the coal industry weren’t coming from the government or environmentalists; it was automation and competition from cleaner forms of energy that produced the long-term decline of coal employment. Likewise, if Trump becomes president again, he can put all the tariffs he wants on Chinese vehicles, but that won’t stop the worldwide transition to EVs. Unlike in coal, jobs in the auto industry can survive in large numbers — but only if the union is strong, and both government and the manufacturers plan for the future we know is coming. But Trump learned a lesson from his experience in coal country: Lie to people about what is possible and they’ll vote for you, and four years later, they just might vote for you again. But Michigan union voters have been wise to Trump before — in 2020, they voted 62-37 for Biden. No one should doubt that Trump thinks those voters are, in his words, “very stupid people,” one more group in a long line of marks he has conned. It’s up to them to prove him wrong again.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
