has become the first sitting US president in modern history to march on a picket line, joining car factory workers in Michigan.
He said that workers had “made a lot of sacrifices, gave up a lot” when car firms were in trouble after the 2008 financial crash, “but now they’re doing incredibly well, and you should be doing incredibly well too”. Labour historians say they cannot recall an instance when a sitting president has joined an ongoing strike, even during the tenures of the more ardent pro-union presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
“This is absolutely unprecedented. No president has ever walked a picket line before,” said Erik Loomis, a professor at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on US labour history.