DAVID MARCUS: It’s Biden’s great green car crash! He plays the picket line hero – yet it’s HIS lunatic electric vehicle diktat that will destroy their jobs… and drive Dems off a cliff

President Joe Biden limped down the shortened steps of Air Force One to the Motor City on Tuesday to show solidarity with auto workers.

It was unprecedented, the lapdog media brayed.

Biden is the first sitting president to go on strike with a union.

Although he stood for about twelve minutes, then spouted slogans through a megaphone for 87 seconds, before leaving for a fundraiser in San Francisco, where donations reached $100,000.

Regardless, it was heralded as an unprecedented show of support.

It’s more likely that we’ll look back at this moment and say, that’s why the Democrats lost the White House.

Biden wore a United Auto Worker baseball cap and a jacket emblazoned with the presidential seal and fist bumped the men and women on the line. He repeated the tired talk of corporate greed that he has leveled at every industry, from oil producers to meat packers.

Then a reporter in the crowd shouted a question.

Does the President agree that auto workers deserve the massive 40% pay increase they are demanding?

‘Yes!’ Biden shouted in response.

Ford’s CEO has said this will put them out of business.

Set the clock for the moment Biden blurts back as he enters the White House. We all know that the president is not responsible for the things he says.

So far, the administration has refused to officially endorse the UAW’s demands for wage increases or full-time pay for a shortened 32-hour workweek.

It’s all nonsense, as our aging commander-in-chief often laments.

He can cosplay a working-class hero all he wants, but he really stabs them in the back.

Biden is an auto union worker’s worst nightmare.

These are the Americans who are especially viscerally feeling the blow of inflation, fueled by Biden’s profligate federal spending.

Forty-four percent of Americans say they will be worse off financially under Biden. Only three in ten approve of Biden’s handling of the economy.

Do Joe’s handlers think his shouting into a megaphone can change this reality? Maybe let him sing some Woody Guthrie songs.

And it’s not just about money.

These people, mostly white men without college degrees, hear the leftists touting diversity, equality and inclusion, and environmental, social, and corporate governance and wonder why their lives keep getting worse year after year.

While nothing better reflects Biden’s true disdain for these workers than his Environmental Protection Agency proposal to mandate electric vehicles, in less than a decade they make up two-thirds of U.S. auto sales.

Today, electric vehicles make up only six percent of the market.

It is nothing less than a promise to bring the industry to its knees in the service of the climate alarmist cult that the Democrats now serve.

Everyone wants clean air and clean water, but how quickly and at what cost?

You see, regular gas-powered cars with internal combustion engines have thousands of moving parts that require skilled workers to put them together. A Tesla has all 17 of them.

More electric vehicles and fewer gas guzzlers mean fewer union jobs, and on Biden’s timeline that impact would be crushing.

An estimated 117,000 Auto manufacturing jobs across the country would be wiped out by the rule. Michigan will be hit hardest, losing 25,000 positions.

Don’t just take it from me.

“Workers who make engines and transmissions today” will see their jobs “eliminated as we transition to electric vehicles,” said UAW research director Jennifer Kelly.

What’s more is that Biden’s mandate does not require the electric vehicles to be produced by union workers. Foreign manufacturers and non-union shops will step in to produce these cars at a fraction of the cost.

Across the Rust Belt, job losses will devastate communities, not only through direct losses, but also through the closure of restaurants and other small businesses that rely on the big factories.

Is it any wonder the UAW hasn’t endorsed Biden for president in 2024?

Biden is not a trade unionist. He is a champion of the wealthy, college-educated elite, who demand ideological purity at the expense of everyone else, and even the environment gets the short end of the stick.

China controls 90 percent of the supply of rare earth minerals that are crucial for EV battery production. And communists seeking global domination are not above pulling these modern nuggets out of the ground at any environmental cost.

In the midst of all this stupidity, hypocrisy and frustration, who comes in promising to make everything right?

None other than Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, Trump called the EV mandate “draconian and indefensible” and claimed that “it will destroy the American auto industry and cost countless thousands of auto jobs.”

On Wednesday, Trump will travel to Detroit to meet with workers.

Comparison may be the thief of joy, but it is also the winner of elections and voters will remember that under Trump they could afford groceries and fill their gas tanks.

The bottom line is that Democrats desperately need these unions to get in line and vote for Biden in November. Lose union-rich Michigan, nearby Wisconsin or Pennsylvania and you can kiss your White House dreams goodbye – just ask Hillary Clinton.

So what can Joe offer the unions if he pushes for EPA rules that turn their backs on them? Maybe more handouts? Government subsidies? More American taxpayer-funded giveaways to the union bosses to ease the pain inflicted on their members?

All Americans should expect to foot the bill for Joe’s destruction of the auto industry workforce as he gropes his way back to the White House in 2024.

I think the good people of Detroit know better.