In Michigan, Trump woos autoworkers, blasts Harris on border. Here are facts
- On Friday, former President Donald Trump delivered remarks outside Grand Rapids and a town hall in Warren
- Trump railed against immigration, international trade and electric vehicles as he seeks to win over union autoworkers
- Trump has visited Michigan almost weekly as polls show he and Vice President Kamala Harris deadlocked
WARREN — As former President Trump fielded questions beside a classic Chevrolet Camaro SS Friday evening on a swing through Michigan, it was autoworkers who took center stage.
Trump only spoke for about 35 minutes at the town-hall style event, but the crowd in Warren was enthusiastic and well-populated with Trump’s target demographic. When Tennessee U.S. senator and moderator Marsha Blackburn asked attendees to raise their hand if they were autoworkers, hundreds of hands went up in a crowd of several thousand.
In the first question, an autoworker who assembles diesel engines asked Trump what he’d do to stop illegal immigration. Trump first cited building the border wall and lamented the increase in border crossings.
“The small number of jobs they created were all taken by illegal immigrants in a short period of time,” Trump said, referring to the administration of President Joe Biden.
The statement doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Fourteen million jobs have been created since Biden took office, while there were 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. as of 2022. Given many of them entered the country before Biden was in office, Trump’s math is impossible.
Earlier the same day, Trump addressed supporters outside Grand Rapids at a production facility of Falk Panel, a Dutch steel firm that came to Michigan in 2017. He spoke at length of one of his key issues, immigration, placing his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, at blame for crimes allegedly committed by people in the U.S. illegally.
Harris, Trump said, is “responsible for every bloody crime scene, every funeral, every orphan child” for what he called “migrant crime.”
He again raised unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud in Michigan.
“That's the only way we're going to lose is because they cheat,” Trump said. “They cheat like hell.”
Trump later pivoted to the auto industry, claiming “foolish and corrupt politicians forced Michigan workers to watch” as jobs were “leached very far away” to countries like China.
In numerous stops in Michigan since the summer, Trump has railed against electric vehicles and what he claims would be disastrous consequences for the auto industry if Harris is elected president.
Trump again returned to those familiar topics Friday, as he railed against outsourcing and inflation.
Watch Trump's address at town hall-style event at Macomb Community College in Warren here:
With polls showing him and Harris deadlocked in Michigan, Trump is making a sustained push to court autoworkers. While union leadership is backing Harris, Trump is attempting to woo the rank-and-file by speaking out against electric vehicles and competition from foreign automakers.
Related:
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- Donald Trump calls Michigan auto industry an ‘afterthought.’ Here are the facts
Macomb County, in particular, is crucial for Trump. He carried the county in 2016 and 2020, and voters there told Bridge this week they are concerned about the future of the industry.
According to the firm AdImpact, Trump’s campaign recently debuted an ad in metro Detroit. It begins “attention auto workers” and repeats his positions on electric vehicles and trade, falsely claiming that a mandate requiring auto companies to switch to EVs is “crazy but true.”
While there is no mandate for an immediate switch to 100% electric vehicles, automakers have said fuel emissions standards set by the administration of President Joe Biden will force them to convert a sizable portion of their sales to electric by 2032.
Democrats are mounting an organized response to push back against Trump’s arguments, hosting calls with members of Michigan’s congressional delegation and United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Fain touted legislation under Biden that has set aside billions to subsidize domestic electric vehicle manufacturing.
“They're doing things to protect that work, and they're actually building manufacturing here, they have a plan,” Fain said.
“That's a whole different story than what Donald Trump did when he was president. He did nothing except more of the same. ”
Under Trump, Fain added, “the rich get richer, keep outsourcing our work, and the handful at the top and the shareholders take all the money, and the people that create the wealth, the workers who generate those profits, get left behind.”
When Trump mentioned Fain in Warren, the labor leader was roundly booed by the audience.
“(Fain) sold you out because he let Biden … come up with an all-electric mandate,” Trump said.
In Macomb County billboards are bashing Trump over the closure of GM’s Warren Transmission Plant in 2019, after his first-term promise that no auto factories would close under his tenure as president.
Other Stellantis facilities in the county have sustained temporary layoffs amid slowing sales and declining profits, though the automaker has also promised to make new investments in existing facilities that will lead to new hires, the Associated Press reported.
Trump took a question from a worker in a Warren Stellantis factory facing layoffs, who asked him his all-time favorite American car. Trump responded “my father liked Cadillacs, so that’s good enough for me.”
Inflation promises
Audience members who have been feeling the pinch asked Trump how he would tackle high prices.
“Stopping and holding inflation, that’s the easy part,” Trump said, suggesting he could lower prices of food “very, very substantially and very quickly,” though he didn’t describe how he would realize the promise.
Trump also repeated an incorrect claim that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was “the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” which was debunked when the claim was first made seven years ago. According to Reuters, those largest-ever tax cuts occurred under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Trump again repeated a promise he made at an earlier town hall in Flint that he would reduce residential energy bills 50% in 12 months, without saying how he would make it happen aside from promoting oil and gas drilling. U.S. Domestic oil production reached a record high in June 2024.
Kennedy, Walz visits
Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also came to Michigan this week as a Trump surrogate to participate in a town hall with supporters just outside Lansing.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz plans to be in Ann Arbor Saturday to catch the football game between the University of Michigan and his state’s University of Minnesota.
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