A version of this story appeared in the On Background newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive On Background delivered directly to your inbox each Friday.
President Biden’s reelection campaign on Wednesday blasted former President Donald Trump’s visit to Michigan as a “deeply shallow” effort to win over blue-collar workers amid the United Auto Workers’ strike.
The ad was released one day after Mr. Biden joined a picket line of autoworkers in suburban Detroit, a historic moment in which he became the first president to participate in a strike. Meanwhile, the pitch came out ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit to the state Wednesday, when he will give a prime-time speech addressing the strike.
“More empty promises in Michigan or anywhere else can’t erase Donald Trump’s egregious failures and broken promises to America’s workers,” said Kevin Munoz, Biden-Harris 2024 spokesman. “He can’t hide his anti-labor, anti-jobs record from the countless American workers he’s let down. This election will be a choice between President Biden’s real advocacy for working Americans and a rerun of billionaire Donald Trump’s broken promises to the middle class.”
The campaign underscored its message with the 30-second TV ad, the first directly attacking Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. It’s running on national cable channels, local TV and digital boards in Detroit, Grand Rapids and Lansing as part of the campaign’s 16-week, $25 million blitz targeting battleground states.
Titled “Delivers,” the ad also is running on Fox Business ahead of Wednesday’s GOP debate, which Mr. Trump is skipping to speak at a nonunion auto parts shop.
The ad shows images of Mr. Trump golfing while it criticizes his tax cuts, which the Biden campaign claims caused automakers to “shutter their plants and Michigan lost manufacturing jobs.
“His promises to restore jobs never came true,” the ad says of Mr. Trump. “Manufacturing is coming back to Michigan because Joe Biden doesn’t talk, he delivers.”
Michigan is a critical state ahead of the 2024 election. Mr. Trump won it in 2016 by picking off the support of rank-and-file union members, but lost in 2020 as those same union workers shifted their support to Mr. Biden. The former president contends he lost the state because of fraud, a charge Democrats dispute.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.