‘Economic Treason’: Trump Accuses Biden of Selling Jobs to China for Personal Gain in Speech to Auto Workers

Former president Donald Trump knocked President Joe Biden for selling the American auto industry’s jobs to China during a speech to striking members of the United Auto Workers union on Wednesday night.

“Joe Biden claims to be the most pro-union president in history. Nonsense,” Trump said Wednesday evening in an address at the Drake Enterprises plant outside Detroit. “His entire career has been an act of economic treason and union destruction. He’s destroyed unions, shipping millions of American jobs overseas while personally taking money from foreign nations hand over fist. Look at money he got from China.”

Trump’s comments on the Biden family’s corruption come as subpoenaed financial records show that Hunter Biden received $260,000 shortly after his father entered the 2020 presidential race and that Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home was listed as the beneficiary address for the payments. House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) revealed the documents Tuesday.

The former president also slammed Biden’s push for electric-vehicle mandates by 2030. “They don’t go far enough and they’re too expensive,” Trump said of electric cars. “A vote for crooked Joe means the future of the auto industry will be made in China.”

“Biden’s job-killing EV mandate has dictated that nearly 70 percent of all cars sold in the United States must be fully electric less than ten years from now,” he continued. “It’s a government assassination of your jobs and of your industry. The auto industry is being assassinated.”

In response to Biden’s clean-energy agenda, Trump laid out his economic vision for tackling electric vehicles if he returns to the White House in 2024.

“I will terminate Joe Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate. I will cancel every job-killing regulation that is crushing American auto workers. I will unleash a thing called American energy [and] stop the ban on the internal combustion engine.”

While rank-and-file autoworkers flooded the manufacturing plant to hear Trump speak, he received a colder reception from union leaders.

A day ahead of Trump’s speech, UAW president Shawn Fain said he wasn’t planning on meeting with the former president to discuss the union’s negotiation process with Detroit’s Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis.

“I see no point in meeting with him because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for. He serves a billionaire class and that’s what’s wrong with this country,” Fain told CNN in an interview Tuesday.

“I find a pathetic irony that the former president is going to hold a rally for union members at a nonunion business,” he added, referring to Trump’s speech at Drake. “All you have to do is look at his track record — his track record speaks for itself.”

Trump’s “track record” involved him failing to respond to the previous autoworker strike of General Motors that occurred in 2019 when he was in office. Fain also pointed to the 2008 recession during which Trump blamed UAW members and their contracts “for everything that was wrong with these companies,” he said.

Meanwhile, the union leader had the opposite reaction to Biden’s visit. Fain and union members on the picket lines welcomed the incumbent president as he shared support for the striking autoworkers.

“Folks, you’ve heard me say many times, Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country, and unions built the middle class. That’s a fact, so let’s keep going. You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid,” Biden said Tuesday.

Still, the UAW has yet to endorse the “most pro-union president,” as Biden calls himself, for reelection even though the AFL-CIO, which represents over 12.5 million workers at 60 labor unions, and about 20 other unions have done so this year.

The historic UAW strike, which began September 15, initially saw more than 12,000 union members simultaneously strike against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. Over 18,000 workers are currently on strike. However, more may join the picket lines as the union could possibly announce another expansion 0f the walkout on Friday.