In the wake of Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien’s remarks at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, liberal commentators were aghast at the very idea of a labor leader validating Donald Trump’s popularity with American workers.
Writing in the Atlantic, for instance, David Graham describes Trump’s working-class appeals as the “Fakest Populism You Ever Saw,” while Rolling Stone summed up July’s RNC as an attempt to court “the working class with hollow, populist rhetoric.”
On one level, there is obvious truth to these assessments. While Trump can point to a few examples where he helped save jobs and project American workers as president — such as his partial success in saving jobs at an Indiana Carrier plant and his renegotiation of NAFTA to include stronger labor protections — overall his record on labor hardly inspires confidence.
To take just a few examples: Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union corporate lawyers and failed to deliver on his promise to bring back significant manufacturing jobs to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. He threatened to veto the union-friendly PRO Act (which, by the way, none of the MAGA Republicans in the senate, including J. D. Vance, voted for), and he pushed through regressive tax cuts that were massively skewed toward the rich and failed to deliver broader economic benefits for ordinary Americans.
While Trump did increase import tariffs with the goal of bringing back American manufacturing jobs, there is no evidence that this policy had a net-positive effect on American jobs.
Given Trump’s less than stellar record on jobs, is his strong support among working-class voters (especially, but far from exclusively, white workers) simply a reflection of his shrewd capacity to get these voters to forget their own economic self-interest by doubling down on appeals to their worst xenophobic, sexist, and racist tendencies? Many liberal…
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Auteur: Jared Abbott
