The Truth About Those “Auto Workers for Trump” at Michigan Event

It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all.

The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry.

It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry.

And just like on Tuesday, one person at last year’s event holding a “Union Members for Trump” told Mauger, who also covered that event, that she wasn’t in the union. Another person holding an “Auto Workers for Trump” sign told Mauger that he wasn’t an autoworker. The United Auto Workers at the time were on strike, and Trump’s actions seemed to show that he didn’t support them.

Vance’s rally on Tuesday was held in a heavily Democratic area in the battleground state, and he attacked President Biden and Kamala Harris’s efforts to help General Motors build more electric vehicles as “table scraps.” But the presence of fake autoworkers there raises the question of whether the people who attended the rally were local.

Trump’s campaign has been mocked and criticized for using fake A.I. images to claim support from Black voters as well as Taylor Swift fans. In the latter case, it backfired and led to Swift herself endorsing Harris, right after Trump’s first (and possibly only) debate with Harris. Will Tuesday’s attempt to inflate Trump and Vance’s support among autoworkers help them win the state of Michigan next month? Some of the latest polls have them trailing Harris in the state.

Donald Trump and JD Vance are busy making more enemies: this time, fans of famous baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng.

Moo Deng, the adorable viral star who lives at Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand, is a pygmy hippopotamus, a protected species. Hippos like her are still targets of hunters, and this week, it was revealed that a big-game trophy hunting group endorsed Donald Trump.

According to a deep dive by Meidas News, the Safari Club International, or SCI, which has demonstrated ties to Trump and Vance, has a record book that proves that its members have hunted Moo Deng’s species. “[The pygmy hippo] is a very wary, alert animal that has proven extremely difficult to hunt by normal methods,” SCI’s record book reads. The group of hunters has more than 40,000 members and 180 local chapters.

After the Trump endorsement news, Meidas News again reported the GOP’s second controversial Moo Deng story.

In a recent podcast with SCI, Vance defended trophy hunters who target endangered and threatened species, arguing that they care about animals “more than people who never spend any real time in the environment,” and discussed the Republican culture war on gray wolves. But Vance’s ties go even deeper: The group also organized a fishing trip with Vance before the podcast recording.

Trump visited the SCI HQ in June, where he met with the “Hunters’ Embassy to discuss our shared fight to protect and promote the right to hunt,” according to SCI.

The group is encouraging and organizing their group of hunters to vote in November. Perhaps Moo Deng’s fans can do the same.

The White House under sexual abuser Donald Trump secretly worked to suppress an FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh while his Supreme Court nomination was under consideration by the Senate.

In September 2018, when Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, Trump promised that the FBI would have “free rein” to fully investigate the claims, adding that the bureau was “talking to everybody.”

“I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion,” Trump posted on Twitter at the time. However, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Trump’s assertions were all a farce, citing a new report by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Whitehouse’s report states that the FBI was directed to conduct a limited investigation in only a week, and requested “additional guidance” from the White House. But Trump administration officials never provided any authorization for a deeper probe into the allegations against Kavanaugh.

Messages to the FBI’s tip line about Kavanaugh were sent to the White House but weren’t investigated, and the FBI wasn’t provided written instructions for the background investigation ordered by the Trump administration, according to the report. The bureau was told by the White House to interview 10 potential witnesses, yet wasn’t given the ability to pursue any corroborating evidence, which some senators cited in their votes to confirm Kavnaugh to the Supreme Court. The FBI didn’t even speak directly to either Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Senate that Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school over 30 years before.

“The congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: The FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” said Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, lawyers for Ford.

Another woman, Deborah Ramirez, alleged in a New Yorker story at the time that Kavanaugh shoved his penis into her face when the two were Yale University students in the early 1980s.

“It’s really disappointing since our client was so candid about something that was a pretty awful experience,” said John Clune, an attorney representing Ramirez.

Trump today brags about his appointments to the Supreme Court and how they overturned Roe v. Wade, severely restricting abortion rights in many states around the country. And it seems that, even as he publicly claimed to be listening to allegations that Kavanaugh had a history of sexual assault, his staff were ignoring them to make their own rapist boss happy.

There have been at least 50 school shootings across the United States in 2024, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. But the Republican presidential ticket doesn’t seem to have any solutions for preventing future violence.

Instead, JD Vance transparently dodged a direct question Tuesday from a reporter with The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan campus newspaper, on the sensitive topic, choosing instead to ramble extensively about paltry school rivalries.

“Why should students in Michigan cast their vote for the Trump-Vance ticket, and additionally, how will your administration support students specifically concerning gun violence when you have rejected calls for tougher gun laws and bans on bump stocks?” the student reporter asked, to jeering and booing from the MAGA crowd. “Essentially, why should students concerned about their safety on campus vote for you?”

It quickly became clear that Vance had no intention of actually answering the question.

“First, let’s be honest here, I don’t know if an Ohio State graduate is the best messenger to University of Michigan students,” Vance said to cheers. “In fact—maybe, we should just get a clip of me saying something nice about Kamala Harris out to the University of Michigan because maybe then they’d all vote for Donald J. Trump if you just told them I was a Buckeye.

“I’m always a little nervous about injecting myself into the OSU-Michigan rivalry,” he continued, still skirting any mention of taking legitimate action to halt the senseless violence.

“All kidding aside, look, we all care about the country,” Vance said. “And that’s why I  think every person in this room is going to help me make Donald J. Trump the next president of the United States.”

Vance then attempted to lure in listening students with promises of creating more jobs in their hometowns and vaguely addressing the housing crisis—though that baseless future wouldn’t help their situation if they found themselves in the crossfire of another shooting.

Minutes later, Vance actually did have some words to share about the topic at hand.

“What I have said is that upwards of 90 percent of the gun crime that’s committed in this country is committed using an illegally obtained firearm,” Vance said.

In reality, a 2023 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, found that the vast majority of guns used in crimes—roughly 99 percent—were purchased legally from a dealer, pawnbroker, or direct from a gun manufacturer, even if they were stolen and used in crimes later.

Vance has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, which spent nearly half a million dollars in Ohio to help elect him to his Senate seat in 2022. The MAGA Republican has also promised to abolish the ATF, which oversees the $9 billion gun industry.

Ultimately, according to Vance, the “best way to reduce gun crime” has nothing to do with limiting the amount of weapons in the country, no matter how destructive or army-ready they are. Instead, the obvious solution is the retroactive one: to “lock up people who are committing violence against their fellow citizens.”

“That’s the most important thing,” Vance told the jubilant crowd.

For all his talk of being a family man, JD Vance went out of his way Tuesday to put a target on the backs of children during a speech in Detroit, Michigan. But they’re the children of immigrants, so why would he care? 

Vance was speaking about undocumented immigrants when he turned his attention specifically to school-age children. 

“The other thing that is crazy about the border, is that in the state of Michigan—I didn’t know this statistic until today—there are 85,000 students in Michigan public schools who are the children of illegal aliens,” Vance claimed.

“Eighty-five thousand. Now think about that. Think about what it does to a poor school teacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English,” Vance said. “Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Here, Vance seems to have widened his net beyond targeting undocumented immigrant children, a plainly heinous rhetorical step in itself, to children who may very well be U.S. citizens by nature of being born here. It’s also worth noting that Vance has a penchant to falsely describe immigrants with protected legal status as “illegal,” so it’s unclear whom exactly he would include in this statistic. 

While it’s also unclear where Vance got “85,000” children from, the number does appear on the Higher Education Immigration Portal, which states that there are 85,000 second-generation immigrant students attending higher education institutions in Michigan. 

If this is in fact the number Vance is using, it’s worth noting that it has absolutely no relationship with U.S. public schools, school-aged children, or even undocumented immigrants. “Second-generation immigrants” refers to people born in the U.S. While Vance’s claim was specifically about the parents, there is no data that supports the claim that all of these students’ parents are undocumented.

In that same vein, it’s likely that these second-generation students would not struggle with English language proficiency. Way to go, Vance! That’s 0 for 4!

But let’s for a moment imagine that the number Vance gave was somehow correct. Even then, his alleged grievances start to fall apart. 

In 2022, 1,433,914 students were enrolled in Michigan public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means that Vance is claiming that roughly five percent of all students in the state are such a gross drain on resources that it has somehow diminished the quality of education for the other 95 percent. Perhaps Vance is right to be concerned about the waning quality of American education. 

Vance’s blatant scapegoating makes no sense because it is not built on real concerns about the quality of education, or the “poor” teachers who might struggle to meet the needs of the classroom because of a lack of education funding. Rather, his claim is built on making racist distinctions between who “deserves” to have access to education and who should be kicked out as a cheap shot for votes in a battleground state.

“Look, I think we’re a great country, we can be compassionate, and we ought to be compassionate, but our compassion has to start with our fellow citizens, the people that deserve to be in the United States to begin with,” Vance said. 

The Ohio senator touted Donald Trump’s plan for the largest mass deportations in the history of the United States as “the best way to be compassionate.”

Vance has previously invoked compassion as a quasi-religious justification for the blatantly bigoted immigration policies. Neither of Vance’s rhetorical lines are particularly new for the Trump campaign, which has repeatedly stressed the strain influxes of immigration can have on schools. But this goes to show how the Republican ticket has normalized rhetoric that targets the most vulnerable in our society.

Last month, Trump made a similar comment about non-English speaking students in schools in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, which was promptly debunked by the Charleroi school district superintendent. In fact, reimbursement from the Department of Education had actually increased as student enrollment increased—the very same Department of Education Trump hopes to dismantle.

Vance’s reckless targeting of school-age children and teenagers also happens to be in a state with the largest populations of Palestinian and Lebanese immigrants. Michigan has the second largest population of Arab immigrants in the U.S., and the highest with the highest percentage population in the country, according to the Arab American Institute.  

This story has been updated.