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In the closing stretch of the 2024 US presidential election campaign, Republican candidate Donald Trump announced that he would be travelling to Michigan, the epicentre of a nationwide strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) at the so-called Big Three — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — then in its second week.
Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine, where she covers labour organizing.
The billionaire who made “You’re fired!” his catchphrase on reality TV now sought to cast himself as a champion of the American working class. Mainstream media outlets quickly took the bait and reported that Trump was heading to the Midwest to speak with striking autoworkers, much as President Joe Biden had walked the picket line the prior week. The requisite think pieces about the GOP’s populist turn and the Democrats’ alienation from the white working class followed in short order.
Had media done their due diligence and taken even a cursory look at the story, they would have reported a very different reality: the former president actually went to speak at Drake Enterprises, a small, non-union parts supplier, at the invitation of the company’s president, Nathan Stemple — not the workers themselves. “Some of our colleagues that we do business with reached out to us”, Stemple explained on Fox & Friends, a conservative talk show. The former president was looking for a venue in the area. Would Drake host him? “We were more than willing to do so.”
No Policy Changes, But a Lot of Rhetoric
Trump is prone to flippantly referring to journalists as “the lying news media”, but he does so because he knows from experience how easy it is to get them to launder his claims without investigating their validity. This is particularly true in matters concerning the working class, with whom they are neither well-sourced nor especially concerned. His stunt in Michigan was no different.
My sources in the labour movement told me that the Trump campaign had not been in touch with the union, nor any of the roughly 150,000 workers who were on strike. A hodgepodge of anti-union organizations and activists were recruiting people to attend the event, sending incessant texts to union members in the area. When the rally took place, there was no evidence that a single striking autoworker was in attendance. But the narrative had already caught on: to this day, most people who are aware of Trump’s visit to Michigan still think he spoke to striking workers.
The Trump Michigan story is a textbook example of the Republican Party’s strategy for growing its base among working-class voters: no policy changes, but a hell of a lot of rhetoric denouncing the rich (their donors) and nostalgia for the alleged “good old days” when workers could support a family on one wage. And it works: Trump’s increased support among workers was crucial to his return to the White House. Even as union members broke for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by 16 percent, Trump won voters without a university degree by 12 percent, up 4 percent over 2020. Educational attainment represents a flawed proxy for class in a country where many billionaires lack higher education degrees while legions of low-wage workers have them, but it’s safe to assume that a lot of the swing towards Trump came from working people.
Rather than blaming the rich, the GOP pins responsibility for social problems on those further down the economic ladder: left-leaning university students and journalists, immigrants and African-Americans.
Why are workers switching to the Republican Party? When asked, some articulate a sense that globalization has left them behind. US workers’ wages have remained largely stagnant for decades even as production sharply increased, with employers chasing cheaper production costs abroad and outsourcing work across the country. Life expectancy for American workers is in steady decline while drug overdoses continue to rise at horrific rates. The worsening conditions facing working-class people make the situation ripe for a rejection of the neoliberal status quo, but that rejection can break two ways, depending on who someone blames.
Some workers point upwards, to the capitalist class who have only gotten richer amidst the decline in workers’ quality of life. Senator Bernie Sanders articulated the most prominent version of this view with his two presidential campaigns, and since then, the socialist perspective he inspired has won particular support in New York City, where Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and mayor Zohran Mamdani reside. But despite their success, the Democratic Party has not appeared interested in such a position on the national level.
The Democrats, for their part, bungled their own presidential campaign. First running a senile President Biden, they then switched to a Vice President Kamala Harris whose message, much like that of Hillary Clinton in 2016, consisted mostly of insisting that all was well in the country.
What explains their strategic incompetence? Like the Republicans, the Democrats prioritize placating the segment of the capitalist class on which they relies for donations. This tends to be a different segment of the superrich than that catered to by Republicans, but make no mistake — they are also very rich. The Democrats enjoy a more diverse voting base by dint of being the alternative to the Republicans’ draconian ethnoreligious agenda and have long relied on organized labour as a base as well, with unions’ voter-turnout operations often crucial, but US trade unions’ ongoing decline makes them less relevant for party strategists. Ultimately, their focus on monied donors over their party’s own future set the stage for the Republicans’ strategy.
The Manufactured Narrative of a Working-Class Republican Party
Trump’s GOP has stepped into the breach. Speaking to workers’ anger and resentment, Republicans have directed it not upwards, but horizontally. Rather than blaming the rich, the GOP pins responsibility for social problems on those further down the economic ladder: left-leaning university students and journalists, immigrants and African-Americans. Some workers find this explanation convincing, especially now that few have access to spaces like a union hall where prejudices can be combatted and stereotypes broken.
Given the options on offer, it’s no wonder some workers have switched their vote to the Republican Party. Yet in the mainstream media, analysis of this rightward shift has been characterized by a bit too much credulity, laundering conservative think tanks’ manufactured narrative of a changed Republican Party that now looks out for working people. A more accurate way to gauge the Republicans’ attitudes towards working people would be to look at the agenda of the White House since the GOP returned to power in January.
The people under the president’s direct employ have faced mass firings, with unionized federal workers’ contracts violated repeatedly as the president and his conservative allies carried out political vendettas, slashing the employment rolls of everyone from the Center for Disease Control to the National Park Service. The administration has also been lax in enforcing workers’ legal protections, be it minimum wage and hour regulations, health and safety standards, or anti-discrimination protections (jettisoned as “woke,” naturally). Trump nominated Crystal Carey, a lawyer who works for the employers, to head the National Labor Relations Board, the agency tasked with protecting private-sector workers’ right to organize. David Keeling, Trump’s head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), was previously counsel for Amazon, an employer responsible for near-constant health and safety violations, leading to deaths in its warehouses as well as an injury crisis among its workforce.
To the extent the rich’s fear-mongering is eroding what solidarity existed across the incredibly diverse US working class, it is a tragedy.
Blue-collar workers, the Republicans’ supposed new favourite constituency, are in a worsening labour market. US manufacturing numbers declined for nine months in a row this year, with factories facing declining orders and more expensive inputs largely as a result of the president’s new tariffs, laying workers off and declining to fill vacant positions. It’s a buyer’s market for employers, with people increasingly desperate for work and willing to accept lower wages and more meagre benefits than they had been during the comparatively tight labour market of the pandemic years. Indeed, current numbers are so bad that Trump tried to shoot the messenger by firing Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner whose job was to compile the monthly job figures.
Then there is the administration’s assault on immigrant workers. The first year of the Trump presidency has seen union leaders arrested, federal security forces besieging residential buildings and handcuffing entire families, children included, with some put in vehicles while naked. The aggressive abduction, detention, and deportation of workers has led much of the US workforce to fear even going to work, introducing a new source of instability across sectors of the economy. On some farms, people have stopped showing up entirely.
More for the Few, Less for the Many
The Trump administration is causing all of this misery on the labour market while also vowing to extend his first-term tax cuts that benefited the ultra-rich. Thus, while it may be the case that Republicans are attracting more working-class voters than a decade ago, their political agenda remains a core of upwardly redistributive programmes such as tax cuts, with a side order of culture war to incite intra-working-class hatred. It’s a magician’s misdirection — look at my left hand so you don’t see what I’m doing with my right — bringing to mind robber baron Jay Gould, who once quipped, “If I could pay one half of the working class to kill the other half, I would.”
Pseudo-populism is a well-worn strategy within the Republican Party. One can chart its modern beginnings with Alabama segregationist George Wallace, who pioneered how to get workers to vote for their own immiseration by playing on sociocultural resentments while forwarding a pro-business agenda. While his segregationist politics found purchase among white workers in the South, they proved unpalatable on a national scale. In the 1968 presidential election, Wallace garnered only 15 percent of blue-collar workers’ votes.
The Republicans took a few decades to refine the playbook, with the 1988 presidential campaign of George Bush, an ultrarich WASP if there ever was one with an inarguably anti-union record to boot, proving to be an important turning point. Rhetorical denunciations were to be focused on the “liberal elite”, a vague, amorphous category that could mean anything from a college student to a journalist to a female CEO — the key was to come off as if one spoke on behalf of a conservative working class who resented those people. It proved a resounding success: Bush won the election with 53.4 percent of the popular vote. As conservative analyst Kevin Phillips commented at the time, “Here we have the nation’s leading preppy — an ornament and offspring of the Establishment — winning as a barefoot populist.”
It’s a fitting summary of the present moment. To the extent the rich’s fear-mongering is eroding what solidarity existed across the incredibly diverse US working class, it is a tragedy. Organized labour is far too weak to combat the hatred now spewed in every corner of the country, and some segments of the movement aren’t even particularly interested in doing so, believing their acquiescence to the illusion of a pro-worker Republican Party might at least save them from becoming a target. More likely, it will only hasten their decline. Union density dropped into the single digits for the first time in nearly a century in 2024. The present farce of a billionaire speaking in the name of workers is what it looks like when working people lose power.
