The first splits are emerging in Trump’s new Republican party
With his nomination of a pro-union Republican as Secretary of Labor, president-elect Donald Trump has emphasised his determination to make working-class Americans, long a reliable source of Democratic votes, a Republican constituency. Trump’s nominee, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was one of the few Republicans in the House of Representatives who sided with trade unions on a number of policy issues.
With his trademark erratic capitalisation, Trump declared on his social media platform Truth Social: “Lori’s strong support from both the Business and Labor communities will ensure that the Labor Department can unite Americans of all backgrounds behind our agenda for unprecedented National Success – Making America Richer, Wealthier, Stronger and More Prosperous than ever before!” This follows Trump’s decision to offer Teamsters president Sean O’Brien a speech at the Republican National Convention last summer.
Trump’s pro-labour gestures are politically shrewd. His election as president in 2024 depended on support from working-class white voters and a growing share of Hispanic and black working-class voters. In this year’s election, 45 per cent of members of households with a union member voted for Trump – up from 40 per cent in 2020 and 42 per cent in 2016. He won voters from households that make less than $100,000 a year, while Kamala Harris won households earning more than that.
But Trump’s pro-labour gestures, like his protectionism and his opposition to low-wage immigration, have alarmed members of the older Reagan-Bush Republican establishment and its corporate allies. The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, a corporate-funded front group, failed to derail Trump’s decision to appoint Chavez-DeRemer with a press release entitled: “Business Group Alarmed by Rumored Candidate for Secretary of Labor”. After Trump announced the nomination, the libertarian Wall Street Journal editorial board condemned it: “Trump’s Labor Choice: Unions Over Workers”. The New York Post complained: “Trump just picked a total turkey to run his Labor Department.”
Libertarian zealots and corporate flacks insist that trade unions are parasitic on individual workers, whose true friends are their bosses.
But most Americans, including most Republicans, disagree. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, 70 per cent of Americans approve of trade unions. Indeed, since 1936, public support for unions has fluctuated between 50 and 75 per cent, dipping to 48 per cent only once during the 2009 global economic crisis. A 2023 poll by the AFL-CIO showed that 52 per cent of Republicans supported labour unions, along with 69 per cent of independents and 91 per cent of Democrats.
In breaking with the radical anti-union sentiment of American conservatives since the Reagan era, Trump is returning to an older Republican tradition. The Republican party has always included many employers hostile to worker power in any form. But for most of the 20th century, the party’s leaders sought working-class votes by acknowledging the legitimacy of organised labour and collective bargaining.
With the exception of 1964, when the Republican party nominated the unpopular libertarian presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who went on to be crushed at the polls, every Republican platform from 1920 to 1996 declared its support for collective bargaining, at least in principle.
From 1923-1929, under three Republican presidents—Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover – the Secretary of Labor was James J Davis, a steelworker and a union member. A Welsh immigrant himself, Davis promoted border controls to reduce immigrant competition with American workers, a goal of organised labour from the 19th century until the late 20th.
The equivalent today would have been the nomination by Trump, not of Chavez-DeRemer for Secretary of Labor, but of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien himself.
It was only in the late 20th century that the Republican party became explicitly hostile to the very existence of organised labour. One reason was the influx of conservative former Democrats from Southern states, and the resulting elevation of Right-wing Texans like the two Bushes, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey.
After the Second World War, the states of the former Confederacy had encouraged corporations to close factories in the unionised Northern states and open new ones in the South by enacting anti-union “right-to-work” laws. This strategy of “smokestack chasing” helped the Sun Belt boom. But it is no substitute in the long run for a growth model based on prosperous worker-consumers and adequate investment in education, infrastructure and public services.
The anti-labour forces in the Republican party also include small business owners and libertarian donors. The business model of many small business owners depends on low wages, so they are threatened by any reform that increases the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay – not only unionisation, but also higher minimum wages and the restriction of cheap immigrant labor.
This explains why, at a time when Republican voters as a whole favour reducing both illegal and legal mass immigration, lobbyists for small business in Washington insist that the federal government must expand their supply of foreign indentured servants (“guest workers”) if the flow of illegal immigrant workers to farms, ranches, factories, hotels, and other industries is cut back.
Meanwhile, most major Republican donors are ideological libertarians who are hostile to organised labor and worker bargaining power in any form. Until recently, wealthy libertarian donors to the party tended to be based in the financial industry of Wall Street, while Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and managers have favoured the Democratic party.
But Trump has attracted some dissident tech tycoons, including Elon Musk, whose dislike of organised labour appears to be so intense that he, along with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, is engaged in litigation claiming that the 1936 National Labor Relations Act is unconstitutional. While grovelling before China’s communist dictatorship to retain access to Chinese labour, Musk has contrasted China’s unfree serfs unfavourably with free American workers: “[Chinese workers] won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they will be burning the 3am oil, they won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”
During a conversation with Musk in August, Trump made the mistake of praising him for supposedly firing workers who went on strike – which is illegal under US labour law. The United Auto Workers (UAW) union immediately filed charges, demanding an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board, the same New Deal-era labour agency which Musk and Bezos are seeking to destroy.
Trump’s strategic blunder does not seem to have dented working-class enthusiasm for him in the election a few months later. One reason is that only 6 per cent of private-sector workers are unionised today. Non-union workers may not care much about technical disputes involving organised labour. Instead, many will identify their economic interests with the health of the industries in which they work – including industries like oil and gas, coal and highway construction which Democrats have targeted because of their environmental effects.
In addition, on issues like transgender policies and abortion, both unionised and non-unionised workers tend to be more socially-conservative or moderate than professional labour leaders who are closely aligned with the Democratic party. Even during the height of anti-union sentiment under Reagan and the two Bushes, Republicans appealed to many working-class voters by promising job creation and opposing social-issue progressivism.
It is possible that Chavez-DeRemer will end up marginalised and powerless in a second Trump administration shaped by the anti-union animus of libertarian donors and owners of cheap-labour businesses. But the long-term realignment in which the Republican party replaces the Democrats as the party of the non-college-educated multiracial working class seems certain to continue.
Michael Lind is a contributor to Tablet, a fellow at New America, and the author of “Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America”