In 2021, not long before J.D. Vance became a Republican senator from Ohio, he went online to rant. “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” he tweeted, as though working parents who might want more affordable child-care options are somehow alien. Vance has no solution for them or for parents who want to stay home with their children. As a senator, he’s proposed no major caregiving policies and even skipped a vote to expand the child tax credit in order to campaign for his running mate, Donald Trump. He is no better on the subject of class war. Though he’s laid claim to a form of conservative populism, his record and rhetoric undermine his credibility. If American workers have champions anywhere, it’s within the labor movement — but Vance opposes the PRO Act, which would make it easier to organize, and has drawn a distinction between “good” unions, like the Fraternal Order of Police, and “bad” unions, like those for baristas. He may not believe that the Starbucks union is for “normal” workers, but if so, he’s badly out of step with the working class, to which many LGBT people belong .
So too is Trump, who repeatedly cosplayed the role of a worker as the election drew to a close. Last week, he put on an orange vest and got into the cab of a garbage truck emblazoned with his campaign logo. Trump had no intention of calling attention to some worker plight. The garbage truck was a prop, like the vest; Trump merely wished to score a point on his opponent, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and her former running mate, President Joe Biden, who appeared to call the former president’s supporters “garbage” in a characteristically befuddling remark. (To give Biden some credit, he was responding to a racist comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”) Trump previously “worked” at a McDonald’s location in Pennsylvania to further his claim that Harris is lying about her college-era job at the burger chain. Asked if he supported raising the federal minimum wage, Trump dithered, saying only that “these people work hard, they’re great, and I just saw something, the process. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”
Trump is not the first politician to put on a working-class costume, and Vance, similarly, is not the first pseudo-populist. Nevertheless, their respective acts may be uniquely repulsive given Trump’s record as president, the company he keeps on the campaign trail, and what he’s said he would do if he returns to the White House. The real forces waging “class war against normal people” include Trump, Vance, and their wealthy allies.
When Trump was president, his priorities were at odds with the interests of the most vulnerable. After he assembled the wealthiest Cabinet in history, he tried repeatedly to raise rents on at least 4 million low-income people, as ProPublica reported in a recent piece, and wanted to cut federal disability benefits for a quarter-million poor children. A Trump-era rule denied overtime pay to “millions of low-wage workers” because they made more than $35,568 a year, the outlet added. His broader agenda included cuts to health care, food, and housing programs that chiefly benefit poor and working-class people, and on labor, the former president was hardly a friend to workers or unions. He packed the National Labor Relations Board with appointees hostile to the rights of workers to organize, and during the height of the pandemic, his Labor Department assigned relatively small financial penalties to employers who put workers at risk of COVID infection and death. By October 2020, OSHA under Trump had not assigned a penalty greater than $30,000 for COVID-related infractions, Politico reported at the time. Similarly, when temporary pandemic-relief measures ran out, the Trump administration opposed the extension of both enhanced unemployment benefits and federal aid to state and local governments, according to a September 2020 overview from the Economic Policy Institute.
Employers and other wealthy interests have every reason to believe that Trump would remain friendly to them if voters return him to power. As he and Vance campaign, they’ve aligned themselves with people like billionaire Elon Musk, who has a notoriously exploitative labor record at Tesla and, more recently, his America PAC. Wired reported that the PAC fired paid Black canvassers after they told the magazine outlet that they’d been forced to ride in seatless U-Haul vans and were threatened with the loss of their motel lodging if they did not meet certain quotas. Musk despises government regulation perhaps as much as Trump does, and the former president has promised him a role heading up a “government efficiency commission.” Musk is nothing if not ambitious. He’s said that Americans may experience “temporary hardship” if Trump is reelected and that he wants to reduce annual government spending by $2 trillion — which is impossible without slicing up major entitlement programs. Elsewhere, Speaker Mike Johnson said that repealing the Affordable Care Act would be “a big part” of Trump’s agenda next year, adding, “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained we need massive reform to make this work, and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
Trump himself has repeatedly promised to make the economy worse for “normal” people. He’s said he will lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, and economists generally agree that his proposed tariffs would raise costs on goods and cause fuel inflation. The mass deportations he’s planned are a humanitarian nightmare that would deal yet another blow to the economy as the nation would lose workers and the taxes they pay. One study from the Center for Migration “estimates undocumented workers contribute $97bn in federal, state and local taxes” and that their deportation could push around “10 million U.S. citizens into economic hardship,” The Guardian reported. Trump-adjacent sources recently told the Washington Post that if he’s is reelected, he will almost certainly fire the pro-worker Jennifer Abruzzo, who is the NLRB’s top attorney, and reverse a Biden-era rule that classified many gig workers as employees rather than independent contractors and made it easier for them to organize unions and qualify for basic minimum wage and overtime protections. Two former Trump officials said that a second administration would loosen restrictions on child labor so that minors could work in occupations that are categorized as “hazardous.” As the Post points out, child-labor violations are increasing, and children have been badly injured and even killed on the job.
Trump’s record, promises, and allies eclipse Vance’s populist act. Any vote for Trump is a vote for class war, and Trump isn’t on the side of “normal” people. Instead, he and Vance are weird, as Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, famously said. But their weirdness is about more than affect or rhetoric; it extends to their material politics, which are far out of step with what most Americans need from their government. Trump can’t even put on an orange safety vest for reasons other than owning the libs. Should he win the election on Tuesday, it’s normal people who will suffer the most.
