Trump attacks Biden in his side event at the Republican debate for joining a picket | International

Donald Trump in his purest style. A demagogue, lazy, climate denier and liar, the former president of the United States has held a rally in Clinton Township (Michigan) to counterschedule the second debate between the Republican primary candidates for the 2024 presidential elections. He has taken the opportunity to attack his probable rival in those elections, the current president, Joe Biden, for joining a United Auto Workers (UAW) union picket the day before in that same state, one of the decisive ones for next year. Trump has also attacked policies supporting electric cars.

Trump has had a few lapses lately (such as saying that Biden was on his way to provoking World War II or a disaster over offshore wind farms), but he has dedicated much of his speech to trying to ridicule Biden, presenting him as mentally incapable. “He spoke for a few seconds and I had no idea what he was saying. He didn't know where he was. He didn't know what he was saying. 'Where I am?' Oh, you're in Michigan,” he parodied, despite the fact that the president had a clear intervention and with a direct message.

Trump has also attacked the electric car. Among the concerns of motor workers is that many of the new plants have non-union workers with lower salaries than the current wages in the sector. They fear a salary devaluation in this way and that is why job security is among their demands. Trump takes advantage of this and attacks electric cars: “They don't go far enough and they are too expensive.”

“Hundreds of thousands of American jobs, your jobs, will be gone forever because corrupt Joe Biden is selling you out, but I don't think it's him. I don't think he really knows what the hell he's doing (...) I don't blame him. But he is surrounded by radical leftist Marxists and crazy people, fascists, bad people. They are selling you to China. They are selling you to the environmental extremists of the radical left. People have no idea how bad this is going to be for the environment too. You know that those batteries, when you get rid of them, a lot of bad things happen to them and the excavation of the earth to make those batteries can be very bad for the environment,” he said in his speech.

The Biden Government has managed to attract strong investments in battery plants and electric cars with tax incentives that have caused concern in Europe, but it has left vehicles with Chinese components out of aid. Even so, Trump's thesis is that Joe Biden's Government is going to destroy the United States automobile industry and hand it over to China. The future of the engine with Biden, he has said, will be ““Made in China” and with him, "“Made in the USA.” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said just the opposite the day before: “Biden is fighting to ensure that the cars of the future are made in the United States by unionized American workers in well-paying jobs, instead of being manufactured in China".

During Biden's nearly three years in office, industrial employment has grown strongly, compared to the decline that occurred under Trump. Despite the corporate and high-income tax cuts passed during his presidency, Trump has presented himself in Michigan as the “defender of the working class.”

Trump knows that to win the elections he needs to attract votes from the working class that supported him in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. He then presented himself as a nationalist seeking the support of those disenchanted with globalization and seduced them with his populist discourse, which he now repeats. He stole from the Democrats the traditional support of a large part of the industrial workers of the so-called rust belt of the United States, where heavy industry is concentrated. He defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, among other states where blue-collar workers have significant weight, and thanks to that he won the presidency. In 2020, Biden recovered the three states that, along with Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, could be decisive again next year.

The former president planned two weeks ago to counterschedule the Republican candidates' debate with a rally in Michigan. Later, Biden advanced it, invited by Shawn Fain, president of the UAW union. When Trump's plans became known, Fain posted a hostile message against the former president: “Every fiber of our union is pouring into the fight against the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers. “We cannot continue to elect billionaires and millionaires who have no understanding of what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get ahead and expect them to solve the problems of the working class,” he noted.

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