CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Michigan (LifeSiteNews) — Former U.S. President Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden’s electric vehicle mandates in his address to an auto union group Wednesday evening in Michigan while skipping this year’s second Republican presidential debate.
“[Biden] wants electric vehicle mandates that will spell the death of the U.S. auto industry,” Trump told a crowd of auto union workers in Clinton Township, just north of Detroit.
Electric vehicle mandates are a sore point for the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which launched a strike earlier this month against the three largest U.S. auto manufacturers — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler parent Stellantis — over complaints of low pay and lack of benefits.
The union’s discontent with wages, as well as federal auto industry policy, have already come at a cost for Biden’s political favor. While the UAW endorsed Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the organization does not plan on endorsing him for the 2024 presidential election, citing “concerns with the electric vehicle transition” he has initiated.
Though Biden has promised “to be the most pro-worker and pro-union President in American history,” the UAW has complained that federal subsidies for auto companies have not translated into “top wages and benefits” for auto workers.
Auto union workers are also concerned that climate regulations enacted by the Biden administration to accelerate a transition to electric vehicles will hurt auto worker jobs, since electric cars require less than half the amount of employees needed for assembly than gas vehicles, as The New York Times has noted.
“The EV [electric vehicle] transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom. We want to see national leadership have our back on this before we make any commitments,” UAW president Shawn Fain wrote in a memo to union members earlier this year.
In the same vein, Trump warned auto union workers that even if they achieve the wage increase they seek through their strike, “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you get, because in two years you’ll all be out of business.”
According to Trump, “by most estimates … 40 percent of auto jobs will disappear under Biden’s mandates,” under which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can cap the amount of pollution emitted by the cars each manufacturer sells. The New York Times has pointed out that the agency “has set that limit so tightly that the only way manufacturers can comply is to sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles.”
The former president also highlighted the impracticality of electric cars, which make driving long distances difficult. “These are built specifically for people who want to take very short trips. They say the happiest day when you buy an electric car is the first 10 minutes you’re driving it. And then after that, panic sets in because you’re worried, ‘Where the hell am I going to get a charge to keep this thing going?’”
Trump accused the Biden administration of further destroying the American auto industry by “surrendering” auto manufacturing jobs to China, claiming that the “real number” of auto jobs that will disappear under Biden will therefore “be 100 percent.”
“A vote for crooked Joe means the future of the auto industry will be made in China,” said Trump, vowing to instead “protect American labor, not foreign labor,” if re-elected U.S. president.
He contrasted his own policy of what he referred to as “economic nationalism” with the “ultra left-wing globalism” of the Biden administration.
Trump, who leads the Republican primary race for the 2024 presidential election by more than 40 points and is expected to go head to head with Biden in the general election, views auto union concerns as a political leverage point especially because many auto union workers live in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, considered key battleground states for the 2024 presidential election.
“With Biden, it doesn’t matter what hourly wages they get, in three years there will be no autoworker jobs as they will all come out of China and other countries,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday.
Trump’s stop just north of Detroit comes only a day after Biden’s own address to auto workers on strike at a picket line in Belleville Michigan, during which he supported their call for a 40% pay raise, saying, “You’ve earned a helluva lot more than what you’re getting paid now,” Reuters reported.