The UAW’s Shawn Fain says a focus on the harm done to workers by Trump’s trade policies can help form a powerful closing message for the Democrats.
UAW president Shawn Fain speaks during a rally hosted by Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris at the Dort Financial Center on October 4, 2024, in Flint, Michigan. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Kamala Harris is centering the final leg of her campaign for the presidency on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. That’s a legitimate concern, and the Democratic nominee will drive it home with what is likely to be an epic address Tuesday, at a mass rally on the Ellipse in Washington.
But Harris’s closing argument should be about more than the fact that Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has since embraced an increasingly authoritarian, even fascistic, politics. It has to include a strong pro-choice appeal and a loud defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And it must also feature potent messaging about the threat that Trump poses to working-class Americans and the communities where they live.
United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain says he knows what can bring absolute clarity to the debate about that threat—Trump’s disastrous missteps on trade policy, an issue that has been central to the Republican’s many campaigns for the presidency.
“We’re calling out Trump’s NAFTA,” Fain explained during an extensive interview with The Nation. “Trump said he renegotiated NAFTA [during his presidency], that he ‘fixed it.’ Well, everything we’ve seen since he supposedly ‘fixed it’ [has headed in the wrong direction]. The trade imbalance in auto went up 20 percent. The imbalance with Mexico went up 30 percent in auto parts.”
Working-class voters in the manufacturing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—all 2024 battlegrounds—are well aware of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that was approved in the 1990s by Democrats and Republicans. Back then, both parties claimed the deal would benefit American manufacturing. It didn’t. In fact, NAFTA was a train wreck, which produced widespread plant closures, daunting trade deficits, and manufacturing job losses so extensive that it has been difficult to track the precise numbers.
“More than 950,000 specific U.S. jobs have been certified by the U.S. Labor Department as lost to NAFTA outsourcing and import floods under just one narrow program,” reported Public Citizen in its 2018 “NAFTA’s Legacy: Lost Jobs, Lower Wages, Increased Inequality” fact sheet, which explained, “This is a significant undercount of the job loss, given that the program, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), excluded many categories of workers during NAFTA’s first decade of damage, and reporting is voluntary, so only those who know about the program and do the work to apply are even considered. The mass outsourcing of American jobs was the outcome about which NAFTA opponents had warned.”
That was an outcome Donald Trump exploited, with great effectiveness, during his 2016 campaign. Trump won that election by turning historically Democratic, Great Lakes manufacturing states red. Then, as president, he launched a convoluted effort to renegotiate NAFTA, which was supposed to undo at least some of the damage. The resulting agreement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, was passed with overwhelming support in Congress and signed into law in January 2020 by Trump, who claimed it would boost manufacturing employment nationwide.
Only 10 senators opposed USMCA, with the measure’s most outspoken critic, US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), saying,
“This agreement is opposed by labor unions like the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers. It is opposed by the Sunrise Movement, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters and every major environmental group in America.
“And it is opposed by the National Family Farm Coalition, which believes it will lock in rules that have devastated family farms and expanded corporate control over agriculture in North America.
“I am proud to stand with these labor unions, environmental groups and family farmers against Trump’s NAFTA 2.0.”
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Joining Sanders in opposing USMCA was the then-first-term Democratic senator from California, Kamala Harris, who expressed concerns similar to those voiced by the senator from Vermont. In the fall of 2020, after Harris joined the Democratic ticket led by Joe Biden, Trump’s reelection campaign attacked Harris for her opposition to USMCA, arguing, “With her vote, Harris prioritized the radical anti-Trump left over the interests of American workers.”
As it happened, Trump was wrong. And Harris was right. She’s said as much this fall on the campaign trail. “As one of only 10 senators to vote against USMCA, I knew it was not sufficient to protect our country and its workers,” she explained in a September statement, where she argued that “it was Trump’s trade deal that made it far too easy for a major auto company like Stellantis to break their word to workers by outsourcing American jobs.”
Harris says that, as president, she plans to use a review process that can begin in 2026 to address the worst problems with USMCA. “I will bring autoworker jobs back to this country and create an opportunity economy that strengthens manufacturing, unions, and builds prosperity and security for America’s future,” says the Democrat.
Remarkably, Trump says he would also seek to renegotiate USMCA, effectively admitting that the agreement hasn’t worked out as promised. “I want to make it a much better deal,” Trump told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo last week.
But Fain asks a blunt question: Why trust Trump, who messed up on trade issues as president, as he now promises to clean up the mess? “Donald Trump, the billionaire, the con man, is not the answer,” says the UAW leader, who told The Nation, “Kamala has been talking about the fact that, in 2026, [USMCA] is up for renegotiation. And now, all of the sudden, Trump says that he wants to renegotiate. Well, wait a minute: ‘You had your chance. You failed. You didn’t fix anything. You made it worse. And now you want another shot to supposedly fix it again.’ Trump’s a con artist. That’s what he’s always been.”
Fain and the UAW have been hammering on this contrast in an outreach campaign that has targeted almost 300,000 active and retired union members in battleground states. In mid-October, Lake Research Partners polled UAW members in battleground states—including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—who had heard from the union about where the candidates stand on a number of issues, including trade policy. The poll found Harris with a 29-point lead over Trump.
With more effort, argues Fain, that lead can grow.
“The proof of Trump is already in the body of work. Trump was president for four years. Auto plants were closing. He didn’t do a damn thing to stop any of it, to save any of it. He didn’t even make an effort to curtail any of that,” says Fain. “He continues to tell this lie that he’s fixing this and he fixed that and he’s saving auto jobs and he’s saving working-class jobs. But his body of work when he was president shows different. He didn’t [fix things]. We lost jobs under Trump, and nothing improved with trade.”
That’s a message Harris should amplify in the closing week of the campaign.
It’s a powerful economic appeal for workers nationwide—especially because of Harris’s record of voting against USMCA. But in the battleground states that could well decide the presidential race, an attack on “Trump’s NAFTA” could be just what’s needed to tip the balance to the Democrat.
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.