The BBC offered a similarly false account: “Donald Trump is in Michigan to woo striking car-workers, a day after President Joe Biden turned up on the picket line in the Midwestern state—an early skirmish in the battle for the blue-collar vote ahead of next year’s White House election.” The news outlet added, “After the 2020 election, exit polls showed Mr. Trump winning four in 10 union members—more than any other Republican for generations.”

That statement is in itself false. The trajectory of Trump’s success is very different. In 2012, Barack Obama won with 58 percent of union households as against 40 percent for Mitt Romney. In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran a singularly dismal campaign that almost seemed designed to alienate labor—remember her pledge that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”?—in the face of Trump’s right-wing populist promises to restore American jobs with a mixture of protectionism and immigration restriction. Clinton shied away from campaigning in major industrial Midwestern states like Michigan—and got only 51 percent of union households as against 43 percent for Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden diligently returned to traditional Democratic themes of economic populism, including a revival of industrial policy to restore manufacturing jobs. As a result, Biden got much closer to Obama’s numbers: 56 percent as against 40 percent for Trump.

Contra the BBC, Trump’s 2020 numbers among union households were the same as those for Mitt Romney—a politician widely regarded as an out-of-touch plutocrat.

Trump has made important inroads among non-college-educated voters, especially white ones. But among union voters, the breakthrough he achieved in 2016 seems to have been a one-off. Union voters are returning to their strong preference for Democrats. That is the real story that media accounts miss.

As Alex Press noted on X (formerly known as Twitter), “the actual interesting story here is that while a lot of UAW members voted for Trump, almost none attended the rally. I imagine that’s because they knew it was an event opposed to the strike’s aims!”

In an article that appeared on Wednesday, The New York Times claimed that Trump has a “mixed record” on labor. But this “mixed record” comes from conflating Trump’s time as a businessman (where as a real estate mogul he had to find ways to work with unions—when he couldn’t get away with stiffing them) with his time as a candidate in 2016 (when he blamed economic troubles on other countries) to his actual record as president (when, according to the newspaper, Trump “made appointments and adopted policies often more antagonistic to organized labor than those of many other Republicans”). These three different approaches only add up to a “mixed” record if weighted equally. That’s an absurd way to make a judgment. Business tactics and campaign promises don’t have the same gravity and importance as actual presidential policy. Judged by the most important criterion—his actual record in governance—Trump is wildly anti-labor.

The media reporting on Trump’s relationship with labor has been so wretched that it’s hard not to get cynical. Trump was terrific for ratings and circulation, so perhaps mainstream outlets are eager to pump him up again in order to get an exciting election in 2024. And of course, the standard problem of the Trump era is that the protocols of nonpartisan reporting require treating Trump with a deference that, given his record of lying, is indefensible. The media remains committed to the idea that the two acceptable “sides” of American politics (Democrats and Republicans) are roughly equivalent.

There’s also the mainstream media’s historic inability to accurately report on labor. We see this not only in the UAW strike but also in the recently settled Writers Guild of America strike. Throughout the strike, as Katharine Trendacosta has documented in Defector, trade publications like Variety, heavily dependent on ads and access by the major studios, have had a noticeable tendency to uncritically publish management talking points.

The great media critic A.J. Liebling, who died in 1963, famously quipped, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” This axiom applies more strongly to labor issues than any others since working class militancy calls into question the root power of the owners of the press.

In 1961, commenting in The New Yorker on a strike by railway-towboat workers, Liebling complained that all the newspapers automatically took management’s side on the supposed problem of “featherbedding” (in other words, the creation of make-work jobs). The reaction to Liebling’s very mildly worded piece was more telling than the column itself. His column was widely reprinted in union papers and led to an outpouring of gratitude. A machinist in Chicago naively concluded that The New Yorker was a magazine that fights for the people and wanted a subscription.

As Liebling noted, “This tempered objurgation [scolding], asking only a modicum of fair play for labor in New York, provoked a reaction of gratitude so exaggerated that it broke my heart. No newspaper anywhere in the nation, apparently, has had a kind word for the working man since about 1936—on this point the press is not lopsided, but unilateral, monolithic, solidary, and unanimous.”

Anti-labor and eager to build up Trump, the mainstream media was destined to mess up the story of the former president’s Michigan visit. In doing so, it made a great argument for alternative media.