The Republicans’ Workers Paradise
Terry H. Schwadron
July 24, 2024
Donald Trump talks about representing the “forgotten,” pointing mostly to white, men workers whose manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas or whose families see high prices for food and fuel.
His new vice-presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance has used his introductory appearances to characterize MAGA as a movement that would stand up for working-class communities like the one in which he grew up and stand against the “ruling class” that had sold them out.
But the record — both in words of platform and of Project 2025 and during the Trump presidential term — are at odds with this idea that Trumpism favors a kind of “populism” that boosts the fate of workers over corporate interests and the wealthy.
Indeed, with policies about making tax cuts permanent that help the nation’s wealthiest, promotion of across-the-board proposals to set tariffs on all consumer products from abroad, insistence on oil and gas drilling when this country already is the world’s biggest energy exporter, opposition to extending health care, housing, Social Security benefits, and a healthy dose of anti-labor moves, Republican deeds suggest a huge gap from Republican talk.
If anything, the kernel of the Trump argument is that by stopping immigration at the border, economic opportunity will increase for jobs that Americans have shown they do not seek or want. Trump and Vance argue that if you make everything produced outside the U.S. from cars to cheese too expensive, American made products will look more affordable.
Where’s the Pro-Worker Policy?
The made-up “pro-worker” stance from Trump and Vance is another sign that we need to listen harder than just accepting a Made-in-America slogan as evidence that there is any interest in lowering prices or in stimulating growth in a time of climate change and heightened environmental concern and the restoration of solid, good-paying manufacturing jobs.
It doesn’t take much research to establish that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who now seems to have collected the majority of Democratic delegates needed to replace him on the ticket have said the same thing about being pro-worker and, further, pro-union. Unllike Trump, they followed through with rules to start making prescription drugs ordered through Medicare more competitively priced, investing in selected industries like computer chip manufacture, working with auto companies on an approach to electric vehicle conversion and appointment of National Labor Relations Board members who allow for union challenges against corporations.
Here was Vance last week: “We’re done catering to Wall Street, we’ll commit to the working man. We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American Citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. We’re done sacrificing supply chains to unlimited global trade and we’re going to stamp more and more products with that beautiful label, ‘Made in the USA.’”
Biden, of course, has said the same. Trump talks about tariffs, as if foreign companies are making payments to the U.S. government. He also talks about devaluing the U.S. dollar to invite more foreign investment even as he decries the advances by Chinese investors.
For Trump and Vance, too much immigration — forget that they mistakenly characterize the bulk of migrants as crime-ridden and mentally ill without any evidence beyond the occasional migrant arrest — takes away U.S. jobs. Trump repeatedly says the millions of new jobs created during the Biden administration have gone to migrants, though no one knows what research might suggest this.
Isn’t it American employers who are complaining that they cannot find enough skilled workers in these low-unemployment rate times, and that workers are too demanding of higher wages, benefits, and, increasingly, the desire to work remotely?
Views on Worker Unions
Biden and Harris even joined United Auto Workers picket lines at one point. Trump supports union leaders only when they support him politically, playing up his backing from some police unions and the president of the Teamsters, John Palmer. Trump and Vance say they support organized labor in theory, but that most labor unions remain “irreconcilably hostile to Republicans.”
Huffington Post notes that Trump and his allies spent a lot of time at the Republican National Convention last week proclaiming that they are on the side of everyday Americans in an ongoing, existential struggle against a wealthy, corporate elite. To the chagrin of the Secret Service, Trump even pulled a UAW electrician whom he recognized from past rallies onto his campaign stage on Saturday, but calling for the resignation of the UAW president.
This worker appeal is a different message than at past Republican conventions, and one that seems to resonate particularly well with angry white, male voters. The trouble is finding it in the actual Republican policies.
Overall, those policies — economic and other — that Republicans are now promoting seem to favor corporate interests over any perceived worker interests. These include plans started in the first Trump years to eliminate business regulations, that require overtime pay, that have allowed insurers to decide on drug prices and landlords to raise rents, that grant tax and policy exemptions to corporations.
In return, Trump promotes his version of trickle-down investment growth to benefit all, regardless of whether any advantage reaches all. Biden’s approach is to use government power to address middle-class and worker needs with direct spending.
Trump has toyed with eliminating income taxes altogether, saying speciously that he could replace money with tariff payments. No one understands how the idea works.
Meanwhile, Trump wants just as much spending as does Biden, just on a border wall and a huge campaign to round up, house, and deport immigrants and for his tax cuts that clearly favor the top wage-earners. One analysis from the Peterson Institute of International Economics concluded that Trump’s policies would “entail sharply regressive tax policy changes, shifting tax burdens away from the well-off and toward lower-income members of society while harming US workers and industries.”
Taken together, one wonders how the “pro-worker” message from the convention isn’t subject to more scrutiny to make even basic sense. Even among the Trump faithful, what Trump would do doesn’t seem to mesh with the anger driving them to vote.
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