Vance’s Fake Autoworkers Just Exposed the GOP’s Big Con

When Vance says that neither he nor Trump has said they’d take money directly from Michigan autoworkers or take money out of Michigan, it’s sleazy rhetorical subterfuge. He and Trump are running on a platform that would nix untold numbers of manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt—exactly the sort of jobs that Vance regularly rhapsodizes about as the foundation of a virtuous working-class life in the heartland.

Vance justifies this stance by claiming that the E.V. transition is sending many jobs to China, which controls much of the E.V. manufacturing supply chain. But that too is misdirection: The IRA contains many provisions ensuring that more E.V. parts are manufactured in the United States. Indeed, the whole point of it is to help the U.S. better compete with China in such manufacturing, on the understanding that the world is moving toward E.V.s and the U.S. shouldn’t cede that industry to China.

But ceding the industry to China is exactly what Vance and Trump would do. The idea that autoworkers’ futures can only be secured by maintaining our attachment to fossil fuel industries is a particularly cynical scam, because the opposite is arguably the case. As Robinson Meyer details, if we don’t adapt to the inevitable transition to E.V.s, “American automakers’ markets will continue to shrink” globally, and in that regard, “a Trump victory will cement that defeat.”