Keeping Right-to-Work Alive

O’Brien’s speech is a good example of the sense that this change amounts to running while standing still. Some with union backgrounds were pleased to see a top labor leader addressing a GOP convention and making a forthright case for the importance of unions. Ken Crider, a Trump delegate from Michigan and a retired sheet metal union worker, was pleased to see a union leader addressing Republicans, even if he admitted his speech didn’t always get the best reception from other delegates. His friend James Hooper also enjoyed O’Brien’s stirring defense of American workers, whether union or nonunion.

“I like that,” he said. “I’m a blue-collar guy.”

But in large part, the view of O’Brien’s speech among those I spoke to at the convention can be summed up as: I was glad he spoke, even if I don’t agree with a lot of what he said. Most looked at the speech as a way to build a voter coalition and win over a larger share of voters, rather than offering pro-union policies the party should champion.

“It’s fantastic. [The Teamsters] have a lot of clout,” Navin Jarugumilli, a 2020 Trump delegate from Wisconsin, told me. “The loss of the Teamster endorsement was a big blow to the Republican Party.” When I pointed out the forthright, pro-union content of the speech, he waved it off. “That’s how they are.”

“The Republican Party is not becoming anti-right-to-work anytime soon,” said Will Lutz, an alternate delegate from Austin, Texas, who said he had been surprised at how much applause O’Brien had gotten. He noted that the reaction reflected an awareness of the importance of “hard-hat” Republicans in the GOP coalition.

This sentiment is not reflected in the party’s more official programming. The word “union” isn’t even mentioned in this year’s GOP platform. One speaker on the final night attacked Democrats for caring “more about appeasing the teachers’ union” than they do about kids,” before endorsing “school choice,” usually a euphemism for supporting pro-corporate attacks on public education like charter schools. Likewise, another speaker that night, Donald Trump,  attacked a major union.

“The leader of the United Auto Workers [UAW] should be fired immediately,” Trump said, referring to UAW president Shawn Fain and apparently unaware that union presidents like Fain are elected by their union’s members instead of “hired” or “fired” at anyone’s whim.

RNC speakers effectively highlighted the big problems afflicting American life right now, such as the skyrocketing cost of living, record homelessness, and high rates of deaths of despair. Their solutions, however, were empty. More often than not, speakers tied every issue to undocumented immigrants and border control. Mass deportations and closing the southern border were presented as the solutions to just about everything, from protecting entitlements like Social Security and Medicare to bringing down house prices.

When not focusing on immigration, the emphasis shifted to turbo-charging fossil fuel production and ending a supposed war on energy production. There was no mention of private equity firms buying up housing, corporations price-gouging consumers, or the fact that the United States is already ratcheting up fossil fuel production to record levels.

At times, it seemed like the GOP’s big idea for beating inflation is simply electing Trump again, with the running assumption that his return to office will automatically stop or even reduce the cost of living. This idea was summed up by one speaker who talked about the need to “bring back the MAGAnomics.”

The specifics laid out in the platform do not point to a turn away from libertarian economics. “We commit to unleashing American Energy, reining in wasteful spending, cutting excessive Regulations, securing our Borders, and restoring Peace through Strength,” it reads.

It is questionable how effective these measures will be in addressing the country’s cost-of-living crisis. In fact, it reads like a fairly typical laundry list of proposals that Republicans have run on in any year before Trump was their nominee, rebranded as solutions to inflation.

“I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately,” Trump himself vowed in his speech that closed out the event. But as he laid out how he and Republicans planned “to bring down prices, and bring them down very, very rapidly,” it too sounded strangely familiar: more corporate tax cuts, slashing the national debt, stopping wasteful spending, as well as further increasing what is already record energy production (which he promised would mean lower prices) and closing the southern border (because migrants are “taking the jobs from our black population, our Hispanic population. And they’re also taking them from unions”).

The closest Trump came to economic populism was his promise to end federal taxes on tips — without addressing the abysmally low tipped minimum wage of $2.13 an hour — and to spend “all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent” from legislation Biden and the Democrats passed. He also offhandedly mentioned he would “bring down interest rates,” referring to reports of tentative plans to allow the president a say in the rates that are currently set by the independent Federal Reserve.

Beyond that, it was slim pickings. There was no mention of popular ideas like a higher minimum wage (which got more votes in Florida than either Trump or Biden four years ago), capping rent increases, expanding Medicare and Social Security benefits, or eliminating personal debts, like the roughly $220 billion of medical debt. The words “health care” didn’t appear once in Trump’s speech, even though being able to afford medical bills and other health care costs are two of Americans’ top financial worries. Similarly, child care wasn’t mentioned, even as parents across the country are spending anywhere between 8 percent and 19 percent of their household income on it. Instead, in both Trump’s speech and the Republican platform, the word “child” tended to appear in the context of violence supposedly committed by migrants.

Trading Culture War for Economic Policy

It is no surprise that the biggest crowd reactions during the convention’s four nights came from standard Republican reactionary talking points, like building Trump’s border wall, deporting immigrants, preventing trans kids from competing in sports, and ending vaccine mandates. When I asked attendees what policy idea drew them to Trump or excited them about his potential second term, they most often cited undocumented immigration and the southern border (that would be the “decisive” issue this election, one delegate said) or the need for a “strong” leader. If an economic policy was mentioned, it was cutting back the government spending that Republicans believe is the main reason the country has become unaffordable (despite Trump having increased the national debt more than Biden).

This strategy might prove successful. Appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment have purchase well beyond what we might imagine as “deplorables,” with just over half the country backing mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, including 45 percent of Latinos and 40 percent of black Americans. Things are tough enough for people in today’s United States that heaping blame on migrants for every ill plaguing Americans could resonate, even if deporting millions will do nothing to actually bring down grocery prices, help Americans afford child care, or avoid bankruptcy from an unexpected illness.

But it will only resonate as long as the GOP’s opponents in the Democratic Party aren’t able to put forward a concerted economic pitch that actually promises to meet voters’ pocketbook struggles. Even at the peak of its salience earlier this year, immigration never overtook cost-of-living concerns and economic issues (which are, in many ways, inseparable) in importance to voters. If Democrats and their presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris, actually campaign on the robust economic agenda belatedly adopted by Biden — including capping rent raises at 5 percent, wiping out medical debt, raising the minimum wage, and expanding Social Security and Medicare benefits — Republicans may well find their laser-focus on migrants and the border carries less purchase.

Has the Republican Party truly become something new? The almost total lack of any bread-and-butter policies at the RNC, and the party’s stubborn commitment to the standard Ronald Reagan–era economic orthodoxy of cutting taxes, spending, and regulations, suggest that it hasn’t, despite the past week’s rhetorical tributes to the working class. To prove their economic populist bona fides, Trump and the GOP will have to show it by governing — and to do that, they have to hope their Democratic opposition doesn’t get its act together and continues running the same substanceless campaign it’s been running the past year.