Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports is one of the sharper knives in the drawer of The Other Gig and, it being college football season and all, he's been spending a lot of time in places like Michigan and Ohio. He's been gently badgering me on one particular topic—OK, he's done everything except parachute into my backyard to harangue me on the subject—and, given the results of this new Detroit Free Press poll showing that Hillary Rodham Clinton's having regained a double-digit lead in Michigan, and a series of different surveys showing HRC has gained ground in Ohio, it may now be time to give the Wetzel his due.

It is now set in the narrative cement that Donald Trump made his bones with white working-class voters due to his having said the right things about trade and unemployment. (He's also been saying other things to appeal to other enthusiasms of the same audience, as Ana Marie Cox points out here, but that's slightly beside the point in this particular discussion.) But what Wetzel keeps harping on is that, as part of his drum-beating against trade, Trump has been positively killing the American auto industry, which is still less than a decade removed from death's door.

For example, he's been pounding Ford for opening a plant in Mexico, but he's only telling half that story. El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago endlessly bellows about how Ford is taking American jobs across the southern border. In fact, one division of Ford will be opening up in Mexico, but no jobs will be lost because the workers at those plants will still be employed producing two new products for the Ford line. Both Bill Ford, the CEO of the eponymous company, and the United Auto Workers agree that Trump has been fast and loose with the truth on this one.

And some of the rank-and-file is getting pissed as well, as the Freep found recently.

For many Americans, Ford, founder of the moving assembly line and famed $5-a-day wages for its early 20th-Century workers, remains an iconic brand from the nation's Motor City. Its F-150 pickup has been the nation's best-selling vehicle for more than three decades. But some of its workers, executives and local supporters are left wondering whether Trump understands the global pressures on today's auto industry. They also question whether he has missed the recent gains made by American autoworkers who survived the economic earthquake created by the 2009 bankruptcies of two of Detroit's Big Three companies. Armed with private financing and federal loans, Ford was the only one that did not accept a government-funded bailout… "I think Trump needs to get his facts straight," said Bill Johnson, plant chairman for UAW Local 900, which represents workers at the Wayne plant. "He is absolutely beating up on Ford for doing what everybody else has already done." Johnson was at the plant in March 2011 when Gov. Rick Snyder and Mulally celebrated an overhaul that transformed it from a truck plant that built SUVs to a plant that could make a profit producing small cars. "We hate to see the products go to Mexico, but with the Ranger and the Bronco coming to Michigan Assembly that absolutely secures the future for our people a lot more than the Focus does," Johnson said.

It is not to support huge international trade deals to say that the rescue of the American auto industry is something in which everybody involved can take a great deal of pride. Politicians up to the president himself, management, and labor all worked together to pull this off in the aftermath of an economic disaster engineered by people who produce nothing but spreadsheets that they later have to shred two steps ahead of the Feds. Americans are making cars again, and a more nuanced politician than Donald Trump would know how to finesse this issue, how to applaud the rescue, but still sympathize with the general consequences of deindustrialization.

But Donald Trump doesn't do nuance. Nuance is what his children get when he marries again and picks up some new sisters-in-law.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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