The president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) bashed former President Donald Trump for joining the striking auto workers in Michigan.
In an interview on left-leaning news network CNN on Tuesday, UAW President Shawn Fain said that he finds “pathetic irony” in Trump’s plan to hold a rally for union workers as the group continues its strike against America’s “Big Three” automakers.
“I find the pathetic irony that the former president is going to hold a rally for union members at a non-union business,” Fain said. “And you know, all you have to do is look at his track record. His track record speaks for itself.”
“In 2008 during the Great Recession, [Trump] blamed UAW members, he blamed our contracts for everything that was wrong with these companies,” he continued. “That’s a complete lie.”
This comes after the former president spoke in front of striking members of the UAW in Clinton Township, wherein he blasted President Joe Biden for simply posing for “photos at the picket line” and directed the blame toward the president’s policies for the strikers’ predicament.
“The workers of America are getting – I’m going to put it very nicely – screwed, you’re getting screwed,” Trump said. “Yesterday Joe Biden posed for photos at the picket line. But it is his policies that sent Michigan autoworkers to the unemployment line.
“He only came after I announced that I would be here. You know, he announced quite a bit later, spoke for a few seconds … and he had absolutely no idea what he was saying,” he continued. “He didn’t know where he was.”
Biden reportedly left the event in favor of a California fundraiser, where tickets started at $5,000 and were capped at $100,000 per person.
Fain, meanwhile, also recalled Trump’s remarks from when he was vying for office in 2016, when he said that automakers should relocate certain production plants from Michigan to lower-wage states in order to avoid having to extend production into Mexico.
“The ultimate show of how much he cares about our workers was in 2019 when he was the president of the United States,” the union’s president said. “Where was he then?”
“Our workers at [General Motors] were on strike for 60 days,” he added. “For two months, they were out there on the picket lines. I didn’t see him hold a rally. I didn’t see him stand up at the picket line.”
