Trump fails the autoworker test twice in one sitting
His screw-ups and lies betray his indifference
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
First off, thanks to our sophisticated readers who understand the importance of down ballot races, we have already raised well over $5K for the swing state legislative candidates that I introduced in Sunday’s newsletter.
I’ll send out one more slate of candidates later this week, so you have until then to donate directly to these first 11 candidates. As always, every penny goes to their campaigns.
Tonight we’ve got some news to review, and for our big story, an examination of the lies that should be one of Trump’s big weaknesses this election season. It’s the sort of thing that vanishingly few people bother to look into, let alone report on, so anything you can do to pass the newsletter around and get the story in front of people would be clutch.
Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.
1️⃣ Georgia: After all those months of plotting, shouting, and acting like maniacs, all the conservatives on the Georgia State Election Board have left is their bittersweet memories.
In decisions issued on Monday night and Tuesday afternoon, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney ruled against the two most high-profile rule changes passed by the election board’s new right-wing majority. Monday night’s decision struck a new rule that had given county election officials the freedom to refuse to certify election results if they had any reason to find them suspicious, a sop to Georgia’s high rate of raving far-right local election administrators.
This afternoon, McBurney ruled that counties would not be compelled to count paper ballots by hand, short-circuiting a tabulation method that would have added days of work and likely introduced both errors and doubt into the process. The Republican judge’s decision on this one was less definitive, as McBurney limited its application to this election only, citing the vague rules and lack of time to train personnel before Election Day.
More background here:
2️⃣ Ohio: There’s not-so-great election news out of the Buckeye State, where a clown car state Supreme Court affirmed that disabled voters were not permitted to have anybody help submit their ballots at a ballot drop box. The rule, implemented by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, was predicated on the evil and totally real practice of “vote harvesting” and the mules that do the grunt work.
In other Ohio Supreme Court news, the wording it permitted LaRose to use for the anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment couldn’t be more cynical or misleading on the ballot.
3️⃣ Maine: Here’s a scary fun story for you ahead of Halloween: iconic horror author Stephen King is single-handedly swamping state Republicans by donating nearly half a million dollars to local Democratic legislative candidates. Perhaps he reads newsletters about the importance of this stuff.
It’s a good thing, too, because Republicans are leading big time in the money race for statewide office positions.
4️⃣ Racism: After spending so much time fired up over the lack of serious news coverage of Donald Trump’s increasingly bigoted and violent rhetoric during the election stretch run, I decided to do highlight it myself. Below is a mashup of all the horrible and what would for other people be career-ending lines from the speech — distilled down, it was nearly 10 minutes of pure slurs and cultural animus.
I regret that I have no idea whether showing Trump bashing immigrants as subhuman scum invaders who infect people’s neighborhoods and murder women without remorse will be helpful or hurtful to his reputation and polling numbers. It is a seriously distressing problem, and it’s fueled in part by the fact that polls show that people don’t think he’s serious.
Still, I’m betting that if people really hear the sick things happening in his head, and understand that the once and potential returning president is this vile, it will change the way many think about him.
Trump fails the autoworker test twice in one sitting
Donald Trump sat for an interview today with Bloomberg News at the Economic Club of Chicago, where he rattled off his usual racist rhetoric about immigrants and gave bad answers to questions about how the economy works. His blackout when asked about the Google antitrust case and poor explanations of tariffs garnered most media attention, while it was tariff-adjacent comments he made about manufacturing that grabbed my attention.
First, Trump asserted that his proposed 100% tariffs on foreign imports would spur foreign companies to start manufacturing goods in the United States. To prove his point, he cited automakers such as Mercedes Benz, which he claims currently cheats the system with an assembly process based in South Carolina.
“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,’ [but] they don't build cars, they take them out of a box and they assemble them. We could have our child doing it.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign was quick to highlight the comment on Twitter, where it posted a clip and accused Trump of “belittling autoworkers.”
The campaign’s post was a fair summation of Trump’s comment, though it actually let the former president off the hook a bit easily.
Trump was almost certainly referring to Mercedes’s line of Sprinter Vans, which are assembled in Charleston. And for years, Mercedes did assemble a large percentage of the cargo van in Düsseldorf, then disassembled it, shipped off the component parts to the United States, and finally reassembled the van in South Carolina.
This began in 2001, with a variety of automakers selling the van under their own brand, and continued through the late 2010s. In 2015, Mercedes decided build out its manufacturing facility in Charleston and begin using American parts suppliers. By 2020, the Sprinter van was made entirely in the United States, even if Trump seems to have blacked out the major transition that occurred over the course of his presidency.
For what it’s worth, the reassembly jobs were never child’s play, as they still involved heavy duty assembly line work. That the jobs were — and remain — lower-paid than many autoworker jobs is a product of being located in the state with the lowest union density in the country.
Trump also claimed that his threat to slap tariffs on John Deere if it went through with outsourcing hundreds of manufacturing jobs to Mexico led the farm equipment company to reconsider.
I knew right away that it was a total lie, because this summer, I spoke with several workers who worked at the now-shuttered Iowa Deere plants where the equipment was made. There were some soul-crushing stories that came out of Dubuque, including one about a husband and wife who each got laid off after years of service to the company.
Trump has conditioned people to believe his tough talk about manufacturing, and the Deere outsourcing is the exact kind of story that Trump has regularly co-opted and turned into a phony populist rallying cry to such great political effect. Though he has invariably failed to deliver on his promises, it’s fair to assume that very few of the voters who have heard Trump spin his personal fan fiction about Deere this summer had any idea that he’s lying, or would even believe it if you told them — a new Gallup poll found that just 12% of Republicans trust the mainstream news media.
Democrats should have seized on what could have been a winning issue for htem: President Biden has actually revived domestic manufacturing, while it was Trump’s UMSCA trade deal that gave Deere the opportunity to outsource without facing any significant trade penalty.
Instead of taking up the populist, pro-union jobs route, the Harris campaign’s unofficial response came from surrogate Mark Cuban, a mouthy billionaire who blasted Trump for threatening Deere executives with tariffs. While Cuban has praised Harris, he has repeatedly criticized popular progressive regulators like FTC chair Lina Khan and SEC chief Gary Gensler, while talking up scams like crypto.
It would be helpful if Harris’s campaign went back to leaning into more populist, establishment-challenging themes and policies, but pointing out Trump’s abhorrent record on worker rights and issues that impact working people should be a significant enough to sway him and others.
For example, Trump’s NLRB jettisoned rules that made it for easier to qualify for overtime pay and form a union, and today it was announced that over Biden’s term, the number of union election filings has doubled from the number under Trump. These stories need to be told to as many people as possible, because the narrative around working class voters flocking to Trump is more than a quirky realignment story. It is built on the idea that Trump’s policies and presidency were just as good for working people, a falsehood that is perpetuated by his lies.
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Great piece of work, Jordan!! It's a huge detail that the loss of faith in the media has very conveniently led to more brazen lying from the magabots, leading to more confusion for voters and where the truth lies on key issues! In this I am so thankful for you and a few others like you on sub-stacks that keep us informed of the truth, and hope people help support his important venue for the real news!1