We hear a lot about how the Rust Belt is Donald Trump’s most likely path to victory, based on his appeal to disaffected white working-class voters. But at some point, Trump is going to have to talk about the issues, and there’s a big one where he may not play well in the Midwest: the 2009 auto rescue. Without it, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan could have lost tens or even hundreds of thousands of jobs … jobs that Trump and running mate Mike Pence would not necessarily have saved.
Well, Trump wouldn’t necessarily have saved those jobs—in true Trumpian fashion, he’s taken several positions on the issue. When it was a George W. Bush policy, Trump liked government assistance. When it was a Barack Obama policy, not so much, especially in 2012 when Trump was busy carrying Mitt Romney’s water:
In 2012, Trump took to his favorite platform to go after the auto bailout, tweeting, "Obama is a terrible negotiator. He bails out Chrysler and now Chrysler wants to send all Jeep manufacturing to China—and will!" While Chrysler did start manufacturing Jeeps in China again, that was to sell them in the country and avoid tariffs there. The company was expanding Jeep production domestically at the same time. That didn't convince Trump, though, who claimed it was all part of a pro-Obama conspiracy.
More recently, Trump took two positions at once, saying “You could have let it go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself, and a lot of people felt it should happen. Or you could have done it the way it went. I could have done it either way. Either way would have been acceptable. I think you would have wound up in the same place." Pence, by contrast, has been consistent, but not in a way likely to endear him to auto workers and their families, who know that bankruptcy without government assistance would have led to massive job loss.
The traditional media is unlikely to hold Trump’s feet to the fire on this one in the way that Mitt Romney, with his “let Detroit go bankrupt” history, faced. And we know Trump will happily lie about his past positions if he thinks it will benefit him. But the voters whose livelihoods were at stake may want more specifics than Trump’s traditional “I would have negotiated the best deal” kind of answer.