"Buying a new car would be half of my annual salary," Cranford said.

This 66-year-old worker has just shaken hands with the US president, who briefly joined a picket line Tuesday in front of a General Motors plant in Belleville, a suburb of Detroit (Michigan, northeast).

He thanked Joe Biden for coming, but because of the energy transition that "will cost jobs", and especially because of Democratic positions on abortion and immigration, he will "probably vote Republican" next year.

And therefore potentially for Donald Trump, the favorite in the conservative party primary.

Shunning the debate of other contenders for the Republican nomination, the former president visited Wednesday a small car factory near Detroit.

He has repeatedly accused Joe Biden of setting up an "obligation" to buy electric cars, even if the Democratic president has not unveiled a plan in this direction.

It would be "an assassination of your jobs," he told his audience.

"I will always be there for you," also promised the Republican billionaire, from this industrial site which is not, unlike the factory in front of which his opponent had gone the day before, affiliated to the UAW union.

Former US President Donald Trump during a visit to the Drake Enterprises auto plant, on September 27, 2023 in Clinton, Michigan © Matthew Hatcher / AFP

The latter launched a historic strike against the three major American manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are fighting to "appeal to the working class electorate, especially white", which will be decisive next year, said Jefferson Cowie, a professor at Vanderbildt University, in an interview with NPR.

"Will they be seduced by Trump's usual rhetoric, especially around race and nationalism? Or will we see a movement more focused on ... Biden's somewhat Rooseveltian vision, that's really the central question," he said.

Joe Biden, who relies heavily on union support, is the first US president to ever join a picket line.

Carolyn Nippa, 51, including 26 years working for GM, still can't believe he greeted him: "It was surreal."

"Cooked"

"I'm not for Trump. Let me be clear. I think he worked for multinationals and billionaires," she said.

Pam, 72, thinks her salvation will come from Donald Trump.

"The cost of living has gone up so much and all because of these electric cars and this shitty +Green + New Deal," said the retired hairdresser, who did not want to give her last name, waiting to cheer the former president.

Nearby, Gerry Henley, a 33-year-old machinist, says: "I look at my pay slip and I ask myself: where did my money go? They just send him to Ukraine."

UAW auto union members picket outside the Stellantis Chrysler Los Angeles parts plant on September 26, 2023 in Ontario, California © Patrick T. Fallon / AFP

Electric cars, very little for him: "I will drive on gasoline until I die".

So, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, which is the champion of working people?

"It's hard to say," said Kristy Zometsky, 44, one of the strikers greeted by Joe Biden on Tuesday.

"This strike is not really a political issue," she said, at the gates of the factory where her father and uncle also worked.

Like all the UAW strikers she met this week, she prefers to talk about the sacrifices made in 2009 to bail out the multinationals.

It was following this economic and financial crisis that Sarah Polk asked herself: "But who really supports us?"

This 53-year-old graphic designer, met in downtown Detroit, is not a worker in the auto industry, but, as an employee of the insurer Blue Cross, is nevertheless unionized with the UAW.

The arrival of Biden, like Trump, "it's a comm operation," says this mother of three, whom she takes care of alone, with "always a month late" to pay her bills.

As a voter, before, she "was rather democratic". And now? "I don't know"

© 2023 AFP