Former Obama car czar slams Biden’s UAW picket line visit: ‘Outrageous’ 

President Biden “bowed to progressives” on Tuesday when he broke precedent to become the first sitting commander in chief to visit a picket line, former President Barack Obama’s car czar said Wednesday, blasting the trip as “outrageous.” 

“For him to be going on a picket line is outrageous,” Steven Rattner, a former top adviser to Obama on the auto industry, said Wednesday in an interview with NBC News. 

“There’s no precedent for it,” Rattner explained. “The tradition of the president is to stay neutral in these things.”

Rattner led Obama’s auto industry task force in 2009 when billions in taxpayer money was used to rescue General Motors and Chrysler.

The former auto czar said that while he understands the politics behind Biden’s show of solidarity with striking auto workers, the trip was still “wrong.” 

“I get the politics. The progressives all said, ‘We don’t want a mediator; we want an advocate,’” Rattner said. “And he bowed to the progressives, and now he’s going out there to put his thumb on the scale. And it’s wrong.”

Biden played up his blue-collar image Tuesday as he stood on the picket line outside General Motors’ Willow Run parts center alongside UAW President Shawn Fain.

Biden pumped his fist as the union boss ranted against “corporate greed” and likened his union’s strike against the “Big Three” automakers – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – to the collective US effort to manufacture military equipment for the Allies during World War Two. 

The president signaled his support for the striking workers when he grabbed Fain’s bullhorn and shouted, “Wall Street didn’t build the country — the middle class built the country. Unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. So let’s keep going. You deserve what you’ve earned and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.”

The UAW, which has withheld its endorsement of Biden, has been critical of his administration’s push to transition car buyers to foreign-made electric vehicles.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, will attempt to woo blue-collar voters in the Great Lake State Wednesday evening at a Detroit rally that his campaign says will be attended by some 500 auto workers, plumbers, electricians, and pipe fitters. 

Trump is holding the event instead of participating in the second GOP primary debate. 

“I LOVE, & WILL SAVE, THE AUTOWORKERS. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post ahead of the event.