The lies Trump tells working people
Donald Trump is terrible for workers and always has been. So why do so many working class folks vote for him?
I’ve been paying attention to Donald Trump for a long time (reluctantly). In my memory, he has never been a friend of the working man or woman (hell, he has never been a friend to any woman, including his own wives, and he literally poops into a golden toilet, but I digress…)
When he was in the building business, Trump stiffed workers and subcontractors constantly, including the workers who built his ultimate New York City prize: Trump Tower, many of whom were undocumented men from Poland… From Time Magazine:
In the summer of 1980, Donald Trump faced a big problem. For six months, undocumented Polish laborers had been clearing the future site of Trump Tower, his signature real estate project on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, where he now lives, maintains his private offices and hosts his presidential campaign.
The men were putting in 12-hour shifts with inadequate safety equipment at subpar wages that their contractor paid sporadically, if at all. A lawyer for many of the Poles demanded that the workers be paid or else he would serve Trump with a lien on the property. One Polish worker even went to Trump’s office to ask him for money in person, according to sworn testimony and a deposition filed under oath in a court case.
For help, Trump turned to Daniel Sullivan, a 6-ft. 5-in., 285-lb. labor consultant, FBI informant and future officer of the Teamsters Union. “Donald told me he had difficulties …,” Sullivan later testified in the case. “That he had some illegal Polish employees on the job.”
And here’s how it turned out for those workers…
For 36 years, Trump has denied knowingly using undocumented workers to demolish the building that would be replaced with Trump Tower in 1980. After Senator Marco Rubio raised the issue of undocumented Polish workers during a Republican primary debate this year, Trump described himself as removed from the problem. “I hire a contractor. The contractor then hires the subcontractor,” he said. “They have people. I don’t know. I don’t remember, that was so many years ago, 35 years ago.”
But thousands of pages of documents from the case, including reams of testimony and sworn depositions reviewed by TIME, tell a different story. Kept for more than a decade in 13 boxes in a federal judiciary storage unit in Missouri, the documents contain testimony that Trump sought out the Polish workers when he saw them on another job, instigated the creation of the company that paid them and negotiated the hours they would work. The papers contain testimony that Trump repeatedly toured the site where the men were working, directly addressed them about pay problems and even promised to pay them himself, which he eventually did.
The documents show that after things got ugly over unpaid wages, Trump sought Sullivan’s advice on the workers and their immigration status. At one point, a lawyer for the Poles testified, Trump threatened, through his own lawyer, to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service and have the workers deported. And when the Labor Department launched a probe of the Polish laborers, Trump again called Sullivan for help, asking him to meet the federal investigator at Trump’s office, according to the documents.
Testifying at a 1990 trial where he faced a charge of participation in a breach of fiduciary duty, Trump told a federal judge he “still didn’t know” if the workers were undocumented, arguing that he had hired a subcontractor who employed them and that he personally “wasn’t very involved in that whole process.” His lawyers also questioned the credibility of Sullivan, who had been convicted of tax evasion in a separate case. When contacted Aug. 23 by TIME for comment on the documents, Trump replied with an emailed statement. “The laws were totally different thirty five years ago,” he wrote in the message. “The building, Trump Tower, turned out to be one of the most successful and iconic buildings ever built. Do you have nothing better to write about than a story that is 35 years old and filled with half truths and false information?”
And he didn’t exactly get better. Here’s a recent piece from a North Carolina outlet called Cardinal & Pine…
During his time in the White House, Trump’s administration embraced numerous anti-worker policies.
His Labor Department changed the rules of who qualified for overtime pay in 2019, making more than eight million workers ineligible for overtime, costing them a combined $1 billion-plus per year in lost wages. Trump also opposed legislation that would have raised the national minimum wage to $15 per hour while in office.
Additionally, his administration rolled back rules that made it more difficult to award federal contracts to companies that were repeat violators of sexual harassment laws, racial discrimination laws, wage laws, and laws protecting workers’ right to unionize. In other words: he made it easier to award federal contracts to companies that repeatedly violated these laws.
Trump also repealed regulations that protected vulnerable workers from amassing debts from payday loans, which are short-term, high-cost loans that are typically due the following payday.
He also made it a habit of making promises he couldn’t keep to workers.
In 2017, he vowed to stop General Motors from closing a massive assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. During a speech in Youngstown, he promised Lordstown residents that manufacturing jobs would be returning to the area, saying “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”
Despite his promises, GM closed the plant two years later. The company that bought the plant, Lordstown Motors, hired thousands of employees, but has since filed for bankruptcy and halted operations.
Trump also promised he would impose tariffs on vehicles coming to the United States from Mexico. In 2020, however, his update of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has long been criticized by blue collar workers, imposed no such tariffs.
While on the campaign trail in Michigan in 2020, Trump also claimed that he “saved the US auto industry.” In reality, Michigan lost 1,900 auto manufacturing jobs, or 4% of the total, from Feb. 2017 to Feb. 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But wait, there’s more…
As a candidate, Trump promised to “stop jobs from leaving America” and to put American workers first.
Throughout his presidency, however, he encouraged the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs, taking jobs away from American workers.
The former president pushed for a corporate tax cut bill that gave companies a 50% tax break on their foreign profits, making it financially advantageous for them to move jobs overseas. The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” which Congress passed in 2017, also allows companies to be tax exempt from a 10% return on tangible investments that are made outside the US.
Experts at both the Tax Policy Center and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) have noted that since this legislation created additional incentives for companies to move their jobs overseas, it accelerated the offshoring of jobs and operations.
The largest beneficiaries of the Republican tax bill—such as Wells Fargo—were already aggressively offshoring US jobs for years. Rather than hold them accountable or address that offshoring, the tax law rewarded those efforts with billions in corporate tax savings.
On two separate occasions, a group of lawmakers also wrote to Trump while he was president, urging him to issue an executive order that would have prevented federal contracts from going to companies that send call center jobs overseas. Trump never responded.
According to a 2020 report from the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, 200,000 American jobs were offshored during Trump’s presidency, and he awarded more than $425 billion in federal contracts to the corporations responsible for doing so, including Boeing, General Electric, and United Technologies.
Read more at the site about his long record of hostility to Labor Unions, including opposing union worker pay raises, and of course his ultimate failue to prepare and protect American workers during the COVID pandemic.
So why do so many working class voters prefer Trump over Democrats, when the data literally shows that the economy and workers do better under Democrats, as even Trump himself once admitted to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer?? I mean… the data is clear:
A new Economic Policy Institute report updates this work to the latest data available and confirms that this Democratic advantage persists. Positive indicators like growth in gross domestic product (GDP), income, and wages are faster, while negative indicators like unemployment, inflation, and interest rates are lower. Further, the fruits of economic growth are distributed substantially more equally under Democratic presidents.
In particular, the report finds that since 1949:
Annual real GDP growth is 1.2 percentage points faster during Democratic administrations than Republican ones (3.79% versus 2.60%).
Total job growth has averaged 2.5% annually during Democratic administrations, while it is barely over 1% annually during Republican administrations. Applied to today’s total workforce, this would imply nearly 2.4 million more jobs created every year under Democratic administrations.
The Democratic advantage is even larger in private job growth than it is for total job growth. Notably, business investment is higher during Democratic administrations, with investment growth running at more than double the pace than it does during Republican ones.
Average rates of inflation—both overall and “core” measures that exclude volatile food and energy prices—are slightly lower during Democratic administrations.
Families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution experience 188% faster income growth during Democratic administrations.
So again, why do so many working class voters choose Republicans??? Brookings took a stab at answering the question:
On the face of it, working-class voters would appear to be evenly divided in their view of the political parties. Thirty-eight percent trust the Democrats more to put the interests of working-class voters first, while 37% trust the Republicans more. Thirty-six percent see the Democratic Party is more committed to governing and problem-solving than in waging partisan warfare, while 34% see the Republican Party in this light.
But this apparent even division is inconsistent with the voting behavior of America’s working class. In 2020, Joe Biden outpaced Donald Trump by 24 percentage points among voters with a college degree or more while losing to Trump by 8 points among those with less than a bachelor’s degree. Among white voters with less than a bachelor’s, Trump prevailed by 32 points, and Trump also did 25 points better among Hispanic voters with less than a college degree than he did among college-educated Hispanics.
The PPI poll helps us understand why this is so. Forty-five percent of working-class voters, it found, believe that the Democratic Party has moved “too far to the left,” and 40% see it as heavily influenced by “special interests like public sector unions, environmental activists, and academics.” They trust Republicans over Democrats to manage a growing economy, promote entrepreneurship and keep America ahead in new technologies, control public debt and deficits, handle immigration, reduce crime and protect public safety, and make public schools more responsive to parents. Democrats lead in only three areas: combatting climate change, managing America’s clean air transition, and respecting our democratic institutions and elections (the last by a narrow margin of 39% to 34%).
Moving from specific issues to broader themes, working-class voters think Republicans do better in protecting personal freedom, strengthening private enterprise, respecting hard work and individual initiative, and creating economic opportunities for working Americans. On what many Democrats believe is the center economic and social issue—making America fairer—their party only ties the Republicans in the eyes of these voters.
To be sure, Republicans still have an affluence problem. By a margin of 41% to 31%, working-class voters believe that the Republican Party represents the interests of the wealthy more than the Democratic Party does, and 38% believe that the Republicans are too influenced by wealthy donors. But to judge from the results at polling booths, these reservations about Republicans are not as weighty for working-class voters as is their long litany of complaints about Democrats.
So basically, social resentments outweigh many working class voters’ concerns about Republicans, even though they know Republicans care more about the rich than about them. And if we’re keeping it real, a good deal of the issue is race…
Fifty years ago, when Democrats were still benefiting from high opinions of the New Deal and low opinions of Republicans lingering from the Great Depression, the party was a hodgepodge of people we wouldn’t normally expect to see voting together. There were, among others, white segregationists in the South, civil rights advocates in the North, liberal Black people, conservative white people, rural farmers and big-city machine bosses. It’s impressive that such an unlikely coalition lasted for as long as it did.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965 put great strain on this coalition, and while white Southerners still mainly thought of themselves as Democrats for long-standing historical reasons, many increasingly felt the party was hostile to the vision they had of the nation and its racial hierarchy. The tension finally snapped in the tumultuous year of 1968 when former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an infamous segregationist, ran for president on a “law and order” platform and inveighed against rising crime rates, school busing and people he saw as “communists” or “un-American.” He garnered an impressive 13.5% of the popular vote as a third-party candidate, winning five states in the Deep South and the support of a lot of racist white people outside the South, as well.
In 1972, Republican Richard Nixon, who won the 1968 election over Democrat Hubert Humphrey, commissioned several studies that found that working class voters had significant economic anxiety about stagnant wages and benefits, and resentment toward people of color and educated protesters. Nixon largely, though not completely, ignored the first concern and leaned in hard on the second.
“White Democrats,” Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips argued, “will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party. When white Southerners move, they move fast.” He said the secret of politics is “knowing who hates who.”
Nixon’s approach of courting white ethnics, of campaigning on “law and order” as George Wallace did, and of reaching out to white country musicians like Merle Haggard was to speak to disaffected white voters rather than largely newly enfranchised Black voters.
Nixon found common ground with union leaders on culture war issues by, for example, appealing to their disdain for hippies and anti-war protesters. Strikingly, the AFL-CIO did not endorse either party’s presidential nominee in 1972, and thus paved the way for a substantial white working class defection to Nixon, who won in one of the largest landslides in American history.
Real talk: SNL had it right…
Also this …
And this …
So what’s going on with Kamala Harris, who like Barack Obama, seems to be winning back working class voters??? (And big caveat, Joe Biden did much better with working class white voters than Democrats normally do…)
From an Intelligencer conversation with onetime Democratic Guru Ruy Teixeira:
Teixera: Things weren’t as class-polarized under Obama as they are now. The Republican and Democratic coalitions haven’t exactly traded places, but they have certainly changed in some important ways. So what Harris is doing right now shouldn’t be confused with reassembling the Obama coalition. Really, what she’s been able to do at this point is push back against some of the losses that Biden was experiencing in his 2024 coalition, relative to the Biden 2020 coalition. In other words, Harris, with her recent success, is getting a little bit closer to where the Biden coalition was in 2020, but that in and of itself is quite different from the Obama coalition.
You’re talking about young and Black and Hispanic voters that she seems to be winning back to some degree, which had been Biden’s big weakness in polling relative to his 2020 results.
It’s a little hard to tell exactly where the gains are coming from, but certainly I think what we’re seeing is that she’s doing a bit better among younger voters, a bit better among Hispanic voters, a little bit better among Black voters, but not necessarily much better among working-class voters. And it appears like she might actually be doing worse among white working-class voters. So that’s the nature of the beast at this point. How all that nets out in terms of building a coalition that can actually win is yet to be determined. Right now it seems to have brought her close to something like parity, but parity is not what you need. As Nate Silver has observed, you need about a two-and-a-half-point national popular-vote margin to actually be favored within the Electoral College, given the biases attended upon the Electoral College today.She’s not there yet, but she’s getting there, and the question is, where is she going to make further gains? The thing that would bulletproof her coalition would be to bring those working-class numbers in general back at least closer to where they were under Biden in 2020, even if they won’t get to the Obama coalition level. In other words, to try to reduce some of the class polarization in her coalition. And also, critically, she’s got to stop the bleeding among white working-class voters in particular. Because if she does significantly worse than Biden did among these voters, that’s going to filter down to a lot of the key states she needs to carry. If you lose white working-class voters by ten points more in a state like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, that’s a big hill to climb.
Which explains why Harris and Walz are leaning into policies that help working people afford their lives, like building more housing, $25,000 home buying assistance, the child tax credit, and taking on predatory lenders. Also supporting raising the minimum wage and making the tips earned by food service workers non-taxable.
It also doesn’t hurt that she is earning strong support from unions including the UAW, or that she has Tool Time Tim on her team.
But bottom line, it’s the policies. That and the sheer joy of her campaign are making waves. A bit more on Harris’ economic plans below:
Let me know what you think! And be sure to register to vote!
They believe his lies. When they realize what he is, it's too late for them. Trump is nothing but a criminal and conman, racist nazi women hating pervert.
Harris/Walz has a plan. Trump/Vance Project 2025. Every time Trump speaks, it's like a masterclass in misinformation. 🤔 The truth matters, and it's time we hold these nut jobs accountable for their words.