In the wake of Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien’s remarks at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, liberal commentators were aghast at the very idea of a labor leader validating Donald Trump’s popularity with American workers.
Writing in the Atlantic, for instance, David Graham describes Trump’s working-class appeals as the “Fakest Populism You Ever Saw,” while Rolling Stone summed up July’s RNC as an attempt to court “the working class with hollow, populist rhetoric.”
On one level, there is obvious truth to these assessments. While Trump can point to a few examples where he helped save jobs and project American workers as president — such as his partial success in saving jobs at an Indiana Carrier plant and his renegotiation of NAFTA to include stronger labor protections — overall his record on labor hardly inspires confidence.
To take just a few examples: Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union corporate lawyers and failed to deliver on his promise to bring back significant manufacturing jobs to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. He threatened to veto the union-friendly PRO Act (which, by the way, none of the MAGA Republicans in the senate, including J. D. Vance, voted for), and he pushed through regressive tax cuts that were massively skewed toward the rich and failed to deliver broader economic benefits for ordinary Americans.
While Trump did increase import tariffs with the goal of bringing back American manufacturing jobs, there is no evidence that this policy had a net-positive effect on American jobs.
Given Trump’s less than stellar record on jobs, is his strong support among working-class voters (especially, but far from exclusively, white workers) simply a reflection of his shrewd capacity to get these voters to forget their own economic self-interest by doubling down on appeals to their worst xenophobic, sexist, and racist tendencies? Many liberal commentators are absolutely certain that the answer is yes. Writing in Vox shortly after Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, German Lopez boldly asserts “Trump won because of racial resentment,” while NPR’s Rich Barlow asserted that “Racial Resentment, Not Economics, Elected Trump.”
While there is little doubt that cynical, fear-based appeals to the worst impulses of working-class whites are an important part of the story, if we look at the content of Trump’s appeals to working-class voters, we see that a narrow focus on the darkest aspects of Trump’s rhetoric belies consistent and often quite powerful appeals that tap directly into decades of economic dislocation experienced by millions of American workers.
A Careful Study of Trump’s Rhetoric
My analysis of Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches and statements reveals that, however disingenuously these messages may have been deployed, he talked a lot about bread-and-butter issues many working-class Americans care deeply about and feel that Democratic and Republican politicians alike have been ignoring for decades.
Let’s start with a 30,000-foot view of Trump’s rhetoric on the 2016 campaign trail. To get a basic sense of how much Trump focused on different kinds of rhetorical appeals during the 2016 campaign, I collected all available Trump campaign statements and speeches from 2015 until election day on November 8, 2016. I then identified the number of times Trump mentioned key words and phrases to capture different policy bundles and rhetorical styles.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was jobs and trade — and not immigration or any other divisive social or cultural issue — that had top billing in Trump’s 2016 rhetoric. On average, Trump invoked jobs and trade (“jobs,” “manufacturing,” “unfair trade deals,” etc.) 10.3 times per statement or speech, compared to the 8.3 times he invoked immigration (21 percent fewer average mentions) and the less than one time per statement or speech he referenced controversial social issues (excluding immigration), from abortion to trans rights and Black Lives Matter. Indeed, Trump used pro-worker rhetoric nearly three times as often — and anti–economic elite rhetoric more than twice as often — as he brought up controversial social issues.
There were certainly speeches where candidate Trump focused more on immigration than anything else, and predictably these speeches were littered with hateful vitriol against immigrants. Among many other blatant falsehoods, he lied about immigrants and their children being convicted of terrorist activities in the United States; he falsely claimed Hillary Clinton wanted to spend hundreds of billions resettling Middle Eastern refugees in US cities; and he erroneously claimed that Clinton would implement an “open borders” immigration policy.
But even in these speeches, Trump spent as much time connecting immigration to the economic well-being of American workers as he did demonizing undocumented workers per se, as in a June 2016 speech when he claimed that “Hillary’s Wall Street immigration agenda will keep immigrant communities poor and unemployed Americans out of work. She can’t claim to care about African American and Hispanic workers when she wants to bring in millions of new low-wage workers to compete against them.” Regardless of whether Trump’s controversial claims were empirically true or false, the point is that his remarks framed immigration in terms of protecting American workers, not in overtly bigoted terms based on the condemnation of an entire class of people.
Trump’s discussion of jobs and trade focused on three key themes: mass job loss due to bad trade policies, life getter harder and harder for American workers, and blaming elites for doing nothing to stop the decline of the working class.
First, Trump regularly invoked the harm free trade policies have had on American workers. In a series of speeches the month prior to election day in 2016, Trump repeatedly argued that “we are living through the greatest jobs theft in the history of the world.” In an October 16 speech in New Hampshire, for instance, he explained that “the state of New Hampshire has lost nearly one in three manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. . . . Since China entered the World Trade Organization . . . 70,000 factories have shut down or left the United States. That’s fifteen factories closing a day, on average. . . . If I win, day one, we are going to announce our plans to renegotiate NAFTA. If we don’t get the deal we want, we’ll leave NAFTA and start over to get a much better deal.” These remarks could just as easily have come from Bernie Sanders or AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka and are consistent with legitimate research on the negative impacts of trade policies on American manufacturing jobs in the 1990s and 2000s.
Next, Trump focused his remarks time and again on how it’s become harder for working Americans to keep their heads above water economically than in the past. In an October 18, 2016, speech in Colorado, he again sounded indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders, exhorting that “many workers are earning less today than they were eighteen years ago, they are working harder and longer, but making less. Some of them are working two, three jobs but still taking home less money.” This, again, reflects the actual experiences of millions of working-class Americans since the 1970s who have seen their wages stagnate or fall, their share of America’s wealth drop precipitously, and their chances of achieving a higher standard of living than their parents crater.
After identifying and empathizing with the economic struggles facing working Americans, Trump consistently put the blame for “a wave of globalization that wipes out our middle class and our jobs” squarely on the shoulders of large corporations and “elites in Washington”:
The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs. . . . Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan — and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs.
Finally, Trump not only invoked classic economic populist messages to call out elites for their role in shattering the American dream for so many, but he also raised up the inherent dignity of working Americans and stressed that they needed more voice in Washington. In a speech in Michigan that August, for instance, he told listeners that his campaign was “going to be a victory for the people, a victory for the wage earner, the factory worker. Remember this, a big, big victory for the factory worker. They haven’t had those victories for a long time. A victory for every citizen and for all of the people whose voices have not been heard for many, many years. They’re going to be heard again.”
And even though it may sound absurd in the abstract given his superelite class background, Trump managed to identify with workers on a personal level, as in a speech in Eerie, Pennsylvania, on August 12:
I grew up, you know they say, “You know you’re really rich. How come you sort of relate to these [working-class] people?” Well, my father built houses, and I used to work in these houses and I got to know the electricians. I got to know all these people. I got to know the plumbers, the steamfitters — I got to know them all. And I liked them better than the rich people that I know.
He reprised this theme a month later in Asheville, North Carolina:
While my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hardworking American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people. You are mothers and fathers, soldiers and sailors, carpenters and welders.
Taken together, these appeals make it pretty clear why so many disaffected working- and middle-class voters — who either experienced these economic crises directly or, in the case of many comparatively more affluent Trump voters, saw it all playing out in their communities — would find Trump appealing. Unlike virtually any politician they had ever heard before, Trump not only spoke over and over again to the economic pain felt by so many working-class Americans but also called out the elite culprits by name, something that traditional politicians typically shy away from.
Know Your Enemy
Nearly a decade later, progressives once again ignore the economic foundations of Trump’s working-class support at their own peril. Yes, of course, it’s too late to reach most Trump voters, whose loyalty to the former president has become a core feature of their identities. And yes, of course, shameful appeals meant to activate latent racial and xenophobic proclivities were a key tool in Trump’s electoral playbook.
However, many past and likely future Trump voters saw something unique in his brash economic populist message and rewarded him for it. Progressives can and must compete for these voters by making the same kinds of economic appeals. But in sharp contrast to President Trump, they must deliver on that rhetoric by implementing policies that will actually help workers rather than the 1 percent.
It’s been eight years since Trump first won the presidency. If progressives want to keep him out of office, they should start by taking his working-class appeal seriously — right now — before it’s too late.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
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