Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, took to the stage on the first night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) with some fiery words for this nation’s “corporate elite.”
“I travel all across this country and meet with my members every week. You know what I see? An American worker being taken for granted,” he said, garnering applause. “The American people … know the system is broken. We all know how Washington is run.”
News reporting in the aftermath of the speech was quick to emphasize the “rare” nature of a union boss appearing at a Republican convention, with outlets calling the speech “unlikely” and “surprising.” According to Politico, Donald Trump and his newly announced vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), represent “a new kind of Republican Party,” which finds itself “increasingly attracted” to a “newly ascendant labor movement.”
While it’s true that O’Brien was the first Teamsters president to ever address the RNC, emphasis on the speech’s novelty serves to obfuscate a more sinister truth: Trump’s “pro-worker” messaging is an intentional prong of his broader reactionary, far right agenda. It is not an aberration; it is a tool — one that has been and will be deployed in the service of white supremacy. The history of far right movements teaches us as much.
Of course, it is a shameless lie for Trump to claim that MAGA conservatism has working-class interests at heart. Under his presidency, he gutted workplace safety rules, implemented tax cuts that heavily favored the wealthy and made anti-union appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency tasked with protecting workers’ right to organize, among a slew of other policies that hurt U.S. workers. Recent reporting from The Washington Post noted that Trump has continued to tell donors in closed-door meetings that he will lower their corporate taxes, and he’s encouraged wealthy backers to donate “because unions were giving so much to Democrats.” On July 13, billionaire Elon Musk announced he would commit $45 million a month to Trump’s campaign, a move that arrives as other Silicon Valley executives and investors flock to support his candidacy. Vance has also received extensive backing from tech billionaires, including investor Peter Thiel, who has poured money into the right’s reactionary flank.
The U.S. has a profound issue with economic inequality and corporate corruption. But it is clear that “the elite” in Trump and Vance’s crosshairs are not corporations, billionaires, or anyone who holds real, material power. Such rhetoric is a dog whistle to the far right, invoking images of a shadowy liberal class that rules Washington and seeks to impose “their” way of life on disenfranchised white Americans. Because, yes, the vision of the United States that the Trump-Vance ticket is constructing is a white nationalist one: Inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a centerpiece of Trump’s candidacy since he first entered the political arena, and it has cropped up repeatedly at this year’s RNC.
“Every day Americans are dying,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in a speech characteristic of the convention’s sentiments, “murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
Such a violent cocktail — anti-immigrant rhetoric coupled with nods to economic populism — has deep roots in history.
An article published in 2016 by Political Research Associates (PRA), a social justice think tank, notes that “right-wing populism can act as both a precursor and a building block of fascism, with anti-elitist conspiracism and ethnocentric scapegoating as shared elements.”
PRA researchers cite the book Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany, in which historian Peter Fritzsche details how the populist surge in interwar Germany was “exploited by the Nazis which parasitized the forms and themes of the populists and moved their constituencies far to the right through ideological appeals involving demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracism.” In recent years, we have also seen similar ideological currents expressed in the far right populist movements sweeping across Europe, with reactionary right-wing parties gaining new political ground in Poland, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Greece and the Netherlands. In June, far right candidates were elected to more seats in the European Parliament than ever before.
Still, it is possible to mount a front against this troubling surge. Earlier this month in France, a coalition of leftist and centrist parties managed to beat back the far right National Rally party, a shocking defeat in a surprise parliamentary election ordered by President Emmanuel Macron. (No party, however, managed to gain a clear majority.)
But President Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment have failed to mount a formidable defense, much less an offense, against the far right populism taking hold of the U.S. To do so would require, in part, that the Democratic Party implement a genuinely left-wing, pro-working class platform. In recent weeks, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) have pushed Biden to adopt a bolder economic agenda. Ocasio-Cortez told NBC News that Biden should “move further towards the working class” by “expanding his policies and vision for a second term.”
Biden has made somewhat of an attempt to incorporate populist policies and rhetoric, repeatedly touting himself as “the most pro-union president in history.” His administration has invested in union jobs via the Inflation Reduction Act, increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board, banned exploitative noncompete clauses and signed an executive order bolstering union organization for federal workers after Trump weakened protections. In 2023, Biden became the first sitting president to walk a union picket line, and he has verbally expressed his support for Amazon workers’ unionization efforts.
But Biden’s pro-labor actions have failed to translate into enthusiasm from working-class voters. “The most pro-labor president in history could hardly do more for unions, but their members aren’t feeling it,” stated one Atlantic article in March. This is, in part, due to a long-standing failure of Democratic Party messaging: A study from April 2024 found that “only a small fraction” of Democrats “call out economic elites in their campaigns,” and few candidates “mention bold, popular progressive economic policies that would have an impact on working people’s lives — from large-scale programs to create high-quality jobs to policies to strengthen unions or raise the minimum wage.” Biden could also better emphasize the differences between his economic policies and those of Trump, putting greater energy toward attacking Trump for how his tariff policies in fact hurt U.S. jobs while he was in office, and how his current proposals could worsen inflation. And on immigration, meanwhile, Biden has replicated some of Trump’s harshest policies, such as halting processing for migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
But it’s not just a matter of rhetoric. Biden has also neglected to back popular proposals that would help millions of people in the U.S., such as Medicare For All or a federal minimum wage increase. In a high-profile move in 2022, Biden signed a bill to stop the Railroad Workers United union from striking for better sick leave. In 2019, he kicked off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted by the head of an anti-union law firm. Democratic lawmakers have also neglected to reform campaign finance laws, with the party receiving more “dark money” from donors in 2020 than Republicans, and many have continued to take corporate PAC money and cozy up to lobbyists — making them easy targets for any ire directed at “elites.”
As the November elections loom, the political future of the U.S. could depend on which party succeeds at galvanizing working-class voters. Trump understands this. The Democrats, still, after all these years, do not.
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