A retired autoworker who spent 36 combined years on the line for both Ford and Chrysler – now Stellantis – started a pro-Trump group of colleagues and retirees in 2017 that has ballooned to thousands in recent times.
In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News Digital, founder Brian Pannebecker said his group started with 30 active United Auto Workers (UAW) members who all supported former President Trump in 2016.
“Word got out around my plant. It quickly doubled and tripled in size. … Other workers at other auto plants started seeing it [on social media] and requesting to join. And all of a sudden I had hundreds of members,” Pannebecker said.
Now, he says his group has expanded outside the internet to regular visits to auto plants around Michigan where he and his army of Trump-supporting union members are engaging with others and building support in a sector long known for its reliably Democrat bent.
Pannebecker said the UAW has and continues to be an important entity for middle-class workers, adding that he and his members support collective bargaining and the idea that unions built America’s working class. Henry Ford also deserves credit, he said, for creating the five-day work week and defying personal interests to offer his employees a then-best $5-per-day wage.
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Brian Pannebecker, founder of Auto Workers for Trump 2024, left, speaks beside former President Trump during a rally in Waterford Township, Mich. (Nic Antaya/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
While Pannebecker underlined that neither he nor his group are at odds with the UAW itself, they notably offer a differing political viewpoint than its leaders, including prominent Trump critic President Shawn Fain.
One major issue uniting his growing group in support of Trump and other Republicans is the Democrat favor shown toward what he calls the “Green New Scam.”
“We think it’s all a farce,” Pannebecker said, adding that it is obvious the American consumer does not want to be forced to buy electric vehicles and that the government’s insistence on supporting EVs over internal-combustion vehicles has led to lines of workers being cut and innumerable EV vehicles sitting idle on lots in Detroit and dealerships across the country.
Pannebecker added that Trump’s forging of the USMCA as a replacement for NAFTA infused a new energy in the automative sector, as it disincentivized offshoring union work.
“After [President Clinton] signed it and it … went into effect, the auto companies – who are in business to make money and profits for shareholders – started closing plants here in the United States and moving them to just south of the border, maybe 10 miles [into Mexico].”
“Well, the Democrats and even some of the previous Republican administrations never addressed that. So, when Donald Trump was running, he said, ‘If I’m elected, I will tear up NAFTA, and we’ll renegotiate our own trade agreement so it’s advantageous to American workers.’”
“And guess what? He kept his campaign promise.”
Pannebecker said Auto Workers For Trump is united behind the two issues of the federal push toward EVs and green regulations, including mileage standards and offshoring that has occurred in recent decades.
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“Kamala Harris is on record saying she would like to see all vehicles built in the United States reaching zero-emissions by 2035. She supported legislation to that effect when she was a U.S. senator,” he said, going on to cite broadcasted claims that she was the most liberal U.S. senator.
“Even more liberal than Bernie Sanders, so she’s dangerous,” he said. “She knows nothing about manufacturing. She knows nothing about the economy. She’s a San Francisco liberal district attorney. And then she was California’s attorney general. And we all know what’s happened in California. They’ve ruined that state.”
“So, it’s just very, very obvious who the choice is in this election for autoworkers: It’s Donald Trump. He’s got a record to run on. Kamala Harris is nothing more than a liberal attorney from California.”
Pannebecker said Harris and other Democrats supported legislation in Congress that would “destroy” the auto industry and its jobs stateside.
President Biden speaks during a campaign event for Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Harris at IBEW Local Union #5 on Sept. 2, 2024, in Pittsburgh. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“My group’s job is basically just to make the auto workers … aware of that, educate them and then rally and motivate the other workers who are already aware of those issues … and make sure they get out and vote. We cannot stay home. Nobody can stay home this election.”
Rep. John James, R-Mich., whose family business is in the automotive supply sector and who represents many of the workers in Pannebecker’s group, told Fox News Digital in a separate interview that liberal politicians “don’t get” workers’ needs.
“They don’t understand that our livelihoods don’t match up with the agendas they cook up in their coastal retreats,” he said.
“When you … put these comply-or-die mandates on industry, the automotive industry accounts for 50% of the economic impact in the state of Michigan,” he said.
While Harris as a senator supported a Zero-Emission Vehicles Act that would phase out other vehicles by 2040, her campaign sent a “fact-check email” obtained by Axios that suggested her previous position had changed and that she “does not support an electric vehicle mandate.”
President Biden and Kamala Harris (Getty Images)
James said federal policy has repercussions, from the workers to the supply chains to the management themselves that go along with the government much of the time.
He said hundreds of autoworkers have and will eventually be laid off because of the green regulatory push and anti-worker policies from the left, and he praised Pannebecker’s work.
James pointed to his own Democrat challenger, Judge Carl Marlinga, and comments he made in a 2022 Detroit News interview in which he criticized James by saying he wants to “hold tight and try to stick with a dying industry as long as we can.”
“Or we can do it my way, which is to embrace the new products of the future, of the new green-industrial revolution.”
When asked Tuesday about such comments by the New York Post, Marlinga campaign manager Alan Fosnacht said that “unlike John James, who is happy to cede the automobile industry jobs of the future to China, what Carl said … is that our policies should prepare Michigan to be the manufacturing capital of the world in the 21st century.”
James, however, countered that the green movement supported is not based “in reality.”
“[The] technology is not yet ready for products that people don’t want,” James said, adding that autoworkers like Pannebecker understand that and are making their voices heard this election season.
As word got out about Pannebecker’s burgeoning group of autoworkers, members began making stops at the massive parking lots outside plants in the Detroit area during the current 2024 cycle.
While he was still working at a Ford axle plant, Pannebecker and other members would set up outside the lots before and after shift-change to greet and engage with the workers coming and going.
Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, attends the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19, 2024. (REUTERS/Mike Segar)
While they don’t impede traffic, Pannebecker said Auto Workers For Trump has been immensely successful in engaging with the hundreds of workers as they wait in line to enter or exit the plants. Sometimes, he said, the workers become volunteers themselves and the dynamic has greatly expanded the group’s numbers.
Many workers often have questions as to why they should support the Republican nominee, he said.
“As word has gotten out, we started getting some of the guys who are working in the very plant that were demonstrating and rallying at get off their shift and walk right out to us … and start holding the signs up.”
“They’ve lost their fear of repercussions by the UAW bosses because it’s just so commonplace that guys in the plants now support Donald Trump, and they want the union leadership to support them.”
While union workers have long been considered a key Democrat voting bloc, Pannebecker said that tide has been changing since Trump infused his own brand of policy into the Republican Party.
Areas of Michigan long held by Democrats are becoming increasingly “swing” districts, he said, adding the same has been happening in areas of the country where other union labor is prominent.
In Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region, counties like Schuylkill, Carbon and Northumberland – previously friendly to Democrats – are flush with Trump signs and now tend to elect Republicans to the state capital, Harrisburg, and to Washington, D.C.
President Biden, who describes himself as the “most pro-union president,” has sought to blunt that by visiting key locations similar to those Pannebecker’s group does.
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Former President Trump (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
Biden toured Mack Trucks’ main facility in Macungie, Pennsylvania, in 2021, and later its now-parent company Volvo’s plant in Washington County, Maryland, in 2022 to burnish his credentials and engage with workers.
Biden often tells stories of growing up in industrial Scranton, Pennsylvania, and later living in Claymont, Delaware, and being a stone’s throw from the massive oil refineries across the border in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania.
In the trucking industry, Pannebecker suggested there is also a growing pro-Trump sentiment due to the same issues of the economy, job outsourcing and green policy.
He credited Teamsters President Sean O’Brien with having an open mind and speaking at the Republican National Convention this year. O’Brien was apparently snubbed by the DNC.
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“I’m not exaggerating here. Almost 90 to 95% of the trucks that drive by, whether they’re hauling automotive parts or whatever … they are blowing their air horns, giving us a thumbs-up, pumping their fist so we can see it,” he said, noting those truckers are often Teamsters.
As for Fain, the UAW leader, Pannebecker said many of the members he speaks with don’t understand how the union elected him.
“He did negotiate a good contract for them and got them caught up on all the give-backs … over the previous two or three contract cycles. But they do not like his politics. They think he’s got a big head now. They disagree with his endorsement of Kamala Harris.”
As for Auto Workers for Trump’s future plans, Pannebecker said they are looking to target some of the largest plants in Michigan in hopes of getting their message out.
“I think it’s going to be fresh in their minds as the voting begins here in Michigan, and Donald Trump will carry the vote of the UAW membership. I promise you,” Pannebecker said.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign and UAW for comment but did not receive a response by press time.
Fox News Digital’s Matteo Cina contributed to this report.