America’s Anti-Trump Labor Bosses Declare War on Their Own Rank and File

The Story Behind the Story Direct From the Trump White House

Rank and file, blue-collar manufacturing workers love Donald John Trump.  Yet, their union leaders consistently have failed to endorse him. This paradox has recently been on display as 2024 Candidate Trump has sparred with United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain over the UAW’s Joe Biden endorsement.

Trump is absolutely right Fain is a “dope.”  As I analyzed in an earlier column (UAW suicide pact with Detroit Three will mean higher costs, lower profits, overseas manufacturing), Fain’s pyrrhic “victory” in the recent UAW-Big Three negotiations is merely a short term “triumph” that  effectively institutionalizes the offshoring of battery production and other key parts of the electric vehicle supply chain to Communist China. 

I’m reminded here of similar deals United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis cut in the 1950s.  While Lewis won higher wages and benefits for existing UMW members, Lewis’ devastating concessions on mine mechanization would forever shrink UMW membership by more than half, crippling the union forever. 

The question now is whether the leaders of other major unions like the Teamsters and Steelworkers follow Fain’s UAW and kiss the Biden ring – despite massive rank and file support for Trump?  This is no small question; rank and file union members swung the vote for Trump in 2016 in the battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – and thereby paved the way for his stunning Blue Wall victory over Hillary Clinton.

Here’s the buried lead: It doesn’t really matter who the union bosses endorse.  Trump will still command a lion’s share of a rank and file that has little regard for these apparatchiks. 

That’s why Trump has exposed Fain for the snarling dope Fain is.  After all, the UAW rank and file likewise shares Trump’s deep concerns about the latest electric vehicle threat from Communist China and is more than ready to jump on the kindred spirit Trump train in 2024 – yet Fain can’t even wrap his now swelled head around that. 

Just why are Big Labor bosses like Fain so disrespectful of Trump and tone deaf to their own rank and file?  My four years in the Trump White House offers a unique perspective.

As a West Wing liaison with organized labor, I had more than one discussion about endorsing Trump in 2020 with luminaries like the late Richard Trumka heading the AFL-CIO, James Hoffa at the Teamsters, and Fain’s predecessor Doug Jones at the UAW.  When push came to shove, each would not come to Trump’s side in 2020 despite the groundswell of support for Trump among their rank and file; and I see their temerity rooted in the historical evolution of presidential politics.

Prior to 2016, the Republican Party of Bush, McCain, and Romney remained true to its Wall Street and corporate contribution roots and treated blue collar workers as sacrificial lambs in the Great Game of offshoring.  This “American carnage,” as Trump would later call it, began with ripples in the 1970s and turned into a full-blown tsunami with Communist China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and subsequent rape of America’s Rust Belt.

That carnage left America’s blue-collar manufacturing workers with no alternative other than the Democrat Party.  Yet, after Democrat endorsement after Democrat endorsement and disappointment after disappointment, America’s blue collar manufacturing workers would come to know a Democrat Party  that would differ from Republicans in only one meaningless regard: While BOTH parties did NOTHING to defend American manufacturing from the economic aggression of China and other nations, Democrats at least gave lip service to helping blue collar America.

It wouldn’t be until 2016 that those who shower after work rather than before saw any hope.  This new morning again in American began the moment Candidate Trump walked down the escalator in 2016 and declared his undying commitment to the renaissance of American manufacturing and a staunch defense against trade cheaters, particularly Communist China. 

Candidate Trump not only talked the talk the rank and file wanted to hear.  President Trump would walk the walk with policies tools ranging from Buy American, Hire American to tariffs on products like steel and aluminum and countries like Communist China.  Yet still, in 2020 campaign, the Big Labor bosses refused to endorse Trump.  

It will likely be no different in 2024.  America’s once dominant manufacturing unions now barely subsist under a woke AFL-CIO umbrella that consistently embraces policies anathema to blue collar manufacturing prosperity.  Without any apparent self-awareness, this Big Labor Herd openly lobbies for open borders, DACA, a “path to citizenship,’ and a horde of illegal immigrant labor millions strong during the Biden regime that will drive down the wages of their members and drive many of their members into the unemployment lines.

Moreover, this new American Carnage goes on even as this unprecedented immigrant horde spikes the crime rate, sucks on the American welfare state teat, and overruns our schools and jails and major metropolitan areas.

Given this chessboard, no one in the Trump camp should fret over the antics of Shawn Fain.  Nor should they get their hopes too high over possible endorsements from the likes of the Teamsters or US Steelworkers.  It is, as they say, what it is; and thank God, Big Labor endorsements no longer matter.