By Adam Wren

Members of the United Auto Workers union march outside the Stellantis North American Headquarters on Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023, in Auburn Hills, Mich. | Carlos Osorio/AP Photo

LABOR PARTY — When Donald Trump heads to suburban Detroit Wednesday to address Striking Auto Workers, the former president will be bracketing Joe Biden’s own visit today to the UAW picket line and unofficially kicking off the general election in a battleground state. But he’ll also offer the latest datapoint in a long coming convergence between his own party and union members.

Despite long standing GOP antipathy toward organized labor, since 2016 when Trump won over more union households than any GOP president since Ronald Reagan in 1980, more Republican officials are aligning themselves with striking workers — or at least aren’t being openly hostile to them. Trump, it’s worth noting, will be speaking at Drake Enterprises, a non-union shop Wednesday. Already, a range of prominent faces in the party have visited the picket lines or expressed support for UAW members, though in ways that stop short of strengthening the power of organized labor. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri spoke to strikers at a General Motors Plant in Wentzville. Rep. John James of Michigan, who represents suburban Detroit and the Reagan Democrat bastion of Macomb County, brought hot coffee to striking workers. And Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio has said that workers “deserve to get their end of the shake.”

This new Republican attitude toward labor is borne out in new polling conducted by American Compass, the conservative think tank trying to chart a post-Reagan, populist vision for the center right that is “pro-worker.” Some 41 percent of Republicans now say “unions are a positive force that help workers and reduce corporate power,” according to a survey of 1,000 Republican voters conducted with YouGov and shared first with POLITICO Nightly. Likewise, 57 percent of respondents agreed that “Wall Street investors are getting rich doing things that weaken our economy” over one that “Wall Street investors play an important role in strengthening our economy.”

Those are eye-opening numbers considering that Democrats have been winning union households by double digits since 1988, according to presidential exit polls. Trump narrowed that gap considerably in 2016, but lost it to Biden in 2020 by a slightly bigger margin.

All of which points to a new possible direction for the GOP — one that is increasingly skeptical of free-market capitalism, said Oren Cass, American Compass’s executive director and a former economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. (Notably, GOP presidential candidates may not have received the memo: Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina suggested the striking auto workers should be fired, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said the union asks were beyond the pale).

“There is no going back to a pre-Trump, 1980s-style conservatism,” Cass told Nightly. “It just does not have anything useful to say about the actual issues of the 2020s.” Trump, Cass said, is “primarily a symptom,” of the party’s new orientation.

“It’s actually a return to being a genuinely conservative party, as opposed to this weird sort of hyper libertarian economics, pro-capital, no matter what kind of force for, globalization and open borders and nation building and all of this stuff,” Cass told me.

Don’t expect the completion of the realignment to be complete by the 2024 presidential election, Cass said.

“Where I think the opportunity for conservatives is so large, it's not to make unions a sort of conservative interest group, the way it's been a progressive one,” Cass said of the unions. “There will be no better win than to move it back toward neutral as a political entity.”

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— Biden joins striking auto workers on picket line: President Joe Biden today became the first sitting president to join a picket line with striking workers, vividly demonstrating his commitment to labor and its central role in his reelection campaign. The president, donning a blue hat with a United Auto Workers symbol, stood on a wooden platform and used a bull horn to speak to the crowd of union members dressed in red. He was flanked by United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain. “The unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. Let’s keep going,” the president told the crowd outside of GM’s Willow Run Redistribution Center in Wayne County, Mich. “You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.”

— Hunter Biden claims in lawsuit that Rudy Giuliani hacked his data: Hunter Biden sued Rudy Giuliani and his longtime lawyer Robert Costello today, alleging they violated federal and California-based computer fraud laws in their efforts to disseminate potentially damaging material. Biden, the son of the president, says Giuliani and Costello broke the law when they accessed data they claim came from a laptop sent to them by a computer repairman in Delaware in 2020. Biden does not concede that that claim is true. But he alleges that he is the owner of some of the electronic data obtained by the repairman, and he alleges that Giuliani and Costello’s repeated copying and accessing of that data amounts to an illegal hacking campaign that persists to this day.

— Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth by up to $2.2 billion, New York judge rules: A state judge today found Donald Trump and his company liable for fraud for inflating his net worth in order to deceive banks and insurers, resolving one of the key claims in a civil fraud lawsuit brought by the New York state attorney general just days before a trial is set to start. Attorney General Tish James’ office “has submitted conclusive evidence” that the former president and his co-defendants overvalued their assets by between $812 million and $2.2 billion from the years 2014 to 2021, the judge, Arthur Engoron, wrote in a court filing. “Even in the world of high finance, this Court cannot endorse a proposition that finds a misstatement of at least $812 million to be ‘immaterial.’”

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TOUGH GUY — The images of gun blasts, razor wire, drugs and crime that appear in a new TV ad for GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis look like other border-security spots flooding the airwaves—until the screen flashes to a rifle-wielding man in fatigues standing in front of a Humvee. “The only candidate fighting to secure our border now is the only candidate who served in a war zone,” a narrator says in describing the picture of DeSantis.

As he struggles in the race, DeSantis is increasingly highlighting a credential that sets him apart from Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican field, reports the Wall Street Journal. The 45-year-old Florida governor served as a Navy lawyer in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

DEBATE PREVIEW — The second Republican presidential debate without Donald J. Trump is missing the front-runner’s star power, but the performances of his rivals on Wednesday are still expected to be deeply consequential — forecasting whether the 2024 field of Republicans will consolidate around a single Trump alternative.

For months, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has been the chief challenger to Mr. Trump. But the governor’s downward slope in the polls — some surveys in the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina have shown him dipping to third place, or worse — have provided a potential opening to wrest that title from him for the rest of the field at Wednesday night’s debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.

Among those watching at home will be some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors who have so far held out from backing any of the candidates, report the New York Times. Major contributors are planning to watch the second debate carefully, according to people in contact with several of them, in order to see who, if anyone, they might rally behind in the coming months.

TRUMP’S FIREWALL — Donald Trump’s Republican rivals once viewed California as a lifeline. Instead, the Super Tuesday state with a massive delegate haul now looks more like a towering backstop for the former president’s campaign, reports POLITICO.

Enduring loyalty to Trump from millions of Republicans in the state combined with new delegate rules imposed by his loyalists are tilting the scales dramatically in Trump’s favor. It’s a rude awakening for the rest of the field as they descend on the state for Wednesday’s debate.

Now polling above 50 percent among Republicans in the state, Trump’s grip on California is so firm that the few rivals with a presence here have dispatched foot soldiers to more competitive turf like Iowa to try to slow his ascent before the race gets to Super Tuesday. While some donors retain faint hope of somehow derailing the ex-president, few honestly believe it can still happen. Rather than serving as the catalyst for a would-be Trump-slayer like DeSantis, the state is far more likely to play host to a coronation for the MAGA king’s third presidential nomination. If Trump’s huge polling lead holds, he will sweep all of California’s 169 delegates on Super Tuesday, cementing his rein in the state that nurtured the rises of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

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The Speaker of Canada's House of Commons Anthony Rota delivers a speech on Friday, Sept. 22. | Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP

EXIT HERE — The Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons resigned today after a quick and fierce backlash for honoring a man who fought in a Nazi division during World War II, writes Kyle Duggan.

Anthony Rota made a sudden but not unexpected announcement to the House of Commons to express “profound regret” and said he would step down as speaker by end of day Wednesday.

“That public recognition has caused pain to individuals and communities, including the Jewish community in Canada and around the world, in addition to survivors of Nazi atrocities in Poland, among other nations,” he said.

Canadian lawmakers gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, 98, after Rota recognized him as a “hero” following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s historic speech in Parliament on Friday — a moment that produced some of the best visuals from Zelenskyy’s visit.

But the story took a twisted turn and burst into global headlines over the weekend when it came out that Hunka was part of the First Ukrainian Division, also known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS under the Nazis.

“This was an embarrassment to Canadians and was completely unacceptable,” Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said today before meeting with Cabinet.

BACK ON THE PITCH — European football’s governing body UEFA announced today it would readmit Russian youth teams into continental football competitions during this season, writes Ali Walker.

Russian international and club teams have been banned by UEFA since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but that is now set to change once the governing body finds a “technical solution” for under-17 boys and girls teams.

In a statement, UEFA said it is “aware that children should not be punished for actions whose responsibility lies exclusively with adults and is firmly convinced that football should never give up sending messages of peace and hope.

All matches played by Russian teams will take place without the country’s flag, anthem and national kit, and not on Russian territory, UEFA’s statement added.

HAPPENING 9/28 — INSIDE THE CANCER MOONSHOT: Join POLITICO on Thursday, Sept. 28 for an in-depth discussion on the future of cancer treatment and innovation. Hear from experts including scientists, government officials and industry leaders as we explore the critical roles played by private industry, nonprofits, the National Cancer Institute and the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health in achieving the Biden administration's goal of cutting the cancer death rate in half over the next 25 years. Don't miss this opportunity to dive into the progress of cancer treatments and learn about the challenges patients encounter in accessing care. REGISTER HERE.

LASTING LEGACY — At 80 years old, how is one of the great American filmmakers of the last half century considering his legacy, his current work, his family and the state of the American movie industry? Through a wide ranging profile for GQ, Martin Scorsese speaks with Zach Baron about these topics and more from his New York home. It’s a fascinating look into the process of an artist who has the benefit of being able to look back at more than 50 years of work as he sets out to continue to produce epics about the experience of living and succeeding in America. Within, you’ll find Scorsese remarkably candid about what the end of his life means, what he wants to leave behind and what he’s already lost.

On this date in 1969: A youth is taken from the scene of demonstration near the Federal Building in Chicago, where the trial of eight charged with conspiring to incite mob action during the 1968 Democratic Convention was taking place. The group became known as the "Chicago Seven," excluding Bobby Seale whose case was ultimately severed from the other defendants'. | Charles Knoblock/AP Photo

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