DETROIT (AP) — In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump sought the votes of key autoworkers in swing states by making false claims urging them to fire their union leader.
On Thursday evening in Milwaukee, Trump said the United Auto Workers union should be ashamed of itself for allowing Chinese automakers to begin building huge factories just across the border in Mexico, from where they would ship cars to the United States duty-free.
However, industry experts say they are not aware of any such plant currently under construction. There is only one diminutive Chinese car assembly plant in operation in Mexico, run by a company called JAC, which produces inexpensive vehicles from kits for sale in Mexico.
“The chairman of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately and every single autoworker, union or not, should vote for Donald Trump,” the former president said.
Jeff Schuster, vice president of automotive research at analytics firm Global Data, which tracks auto production, said he was not aware of any Chinese auto assembly plants under construction in Mexico and said Trump’s claims were “clearly exaggerated.”
Although Global Data expects Chinese automakers such as BYD and Chery to build factories in Mexico in the future, this has not happened yet, Schuster said.
However, Chinese companies have long expressed a desire to enter the lucrative US market. In his speech, Trump welcomed them and said that Chinese car factories would be built in the US, otherwise he would double or triple tariffs on every car, making them unsellable in America.
President Joe Biden imposed tariffs on Chinese imported goods, including electric vehicles, earlier this year.
The UAW and its president, Shawn Fain, hit back after Trump’s speech. The union called Trump a “strikebreaker” and said on social media site X that he represents billionaires, not workers. “Strikebreaker” is a derogatory term for workers who break union picket lines and work during a strike.
Fain came forward with a statement on Friday, saying Trump attacked the union in the name of protecting autoworkers. But Fain claimed Trump, as president, took no action in 2019 when General Motors closed a diminutive car factory in Lordstown, Ohio. Fain also said Trump took no action when autoworkers went on strike against GM during his term, Fain said.
“He wants to line the pockets of the filthy rich auto executives. He wants to lower the corporate tax rates of his golf buddies,” Fain said. “He wants auto workers to keep quiet and settle for the crumbs instead of standing up and fighting for more.”
The UAW endorsed Biden’s re-election campaign in January, just months after the Democratic president joined the picket lines of General Motors workers near Detroit. Last fall, the union won gigantic wage increases after constrained strikes at all three Detroit automakers.
Trump and Biden are both vying for the support of the 1.3 million-member Teamsters union.
Given the importance of autoworkers in the swing state of Michigan, Trump and his novel running mate JD Vance plan to hold a rally in Grand Rapids on Saturday. It will be Trump’s fourth campaign visit to the state since mid-March, when he won enough GOP delegates to become the party’s nominee.
The rally in Grand Rapids will be his first campaign event since he accepted the official nomination of the Republican Party at the recently concluded Republican National Convention. Trump gave a speech in the city in early April.
In his acceptance speech, Trump also announced that he would end the Biden administration’s “electric vehicle mandate” on the first day of his second term. Instead, the money earmarked for tax breaks to encourage the sale of electric vehicles would be used for infrastructure projects.
Such a move would save the U.S. auto industry from the “utter destruction that is currently taking place,” he said.
There is no requirement for automakers to sell electric vehicles that meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas emissions limits. However, to meet the limits, automakers will almost certainly have to sell some electric vehicles that emit no pollutants.
Even in the most confident scenario of the EPA regulation, electric vehicles would account for 56% of all U.S. novel car sales in 2032. The rest would be internal combustion engine vehicles or hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles.
But given the decline in electric car sales, this forecast looks pretty rosy. The share of electric cars in total novel car sales in the US fell to 7.1% in the first half of this year. For the whole of last year, it was 7.6%.
However, electric vehicle sales are on the rise. According to Motorintelligence.com, automakers sold 597,958 electric vehicles from January to June, an raise of about 6.8% over the same period last year.
The EPA projects that by 2055, 31 years from now, most gasoline vehicles will have disappeared.
The auto industry is currently far from extinction. Since Biden took office in January 2021, the number of people employed in auto and parts manufacturing has increased 13.8% to just over 1 million, according to the Labor Department. Detroit automakers General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have posted a series of forceful annual earnings. Together, they posted net income of $35.5 billion last year.
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Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson contributed to this report from Mexico City.
