At the Economic Club of Chicago Tuesday, Donald Trump took a shot at a voting bloc he definitely needs to win in November: auto industry workers.While being interviewed by Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait, Trump spoke about how auto factories in the United States aren’t really building cars.“Mercedes-Benz will start building in the United States, and they have a little bit. But do you know what they really are? Assembly, like in South Carolina. But they build everything in Germany and then they assemble it here,” Trump said.
They get away with murder because they say, ‘Oh yes, we’re building cars.’ They don’t build cars. They take ’em out of a box, and they assemble ’em. We could have our child do it,” Trump added.
Why would Trump belittle autoworkers when Michigan, a battleground state, is home to the American automobile industry? Even with foreign automakers, whose U.S. operations are typically located in less union-friendly Republican-leaning states, autoworkers’ jobs could not be done by a child.The former president may have handed an easy campaign ad for the Harris campaign to use not only in Michigan but also in Ohio, which is home to several auto industry plants. Already, Kamala Harris’s campaign has seized on Trump’s remarks, posting video of the comments on X with the caption, “Trump belittles auto workers, saying they just assemble parts ‘out of a box’ and says children could do their jobs: ‘We could have our child do it.’”
Trump’s interview in Chicago Tuesday went quite poorly for him, as he struggled when Micklethwait fact-checked him and threw a fit when he was told his economic plans would wreck the economy. Right now, the former president probably regrets ever participating in the event, although with his cognitive decline, he might think that he nailed it.
