Here's Your "Party of the Working Class," Suckers

Blue-collar votes sent Trump back to the White House. Now his plutocratic administration moves in to screw them over.

USDA photo by Lance Cheung

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Every time a Republican says “We’re the party of the working class” you can hear a little hint of mischief in their voice. It’s partly satisfaction at them successfully achieving (at least in part) a goal they’ve held for decades, to shed their image as the party of patrician elites and win the hearts of the far more numerous body of voters who don’t use “summer” as a verb. Even more, it’s the pleasure they take in knowing that it drives Democrats nuts to hear it, both for its dishonesty and the fact that so many people have come to believe it. 

But there’s something else in that smirk, too. It’s the feeling a con artist gets when they know the marks have taken the bait. 

Donald Trump won’t take office for almost two months, but the degree to which his administration is shaping up to be the very opposite of one on the side of working people is truly remarkable. Let’s take a look at some of the personnel and policy moves in the works:

• Tax cuts for the top. The single most important policy goal on the agenda of the new Republican Congress is to extend the tax cuts passed at the outset of Trump’s first term in 2017, which were skewed toward corporations and the rich. We don’t know yet what the final bill will look like, but it will almost certainly include even more goodies for those at the top.

• A plutocratic executive branch. In Trump’s nearly-completed cabinet there are four billionaires or near-billionaires (Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, and Doug Burgum). Bessent and Lutnick, Trump’s nominees to head the Treasury and Commerce Departments, come right from Wall Street. Many of Trump’s top aides, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, are corporate lobbyists. And of course, Trump is moving toward the creation of a broligarchy by announcing that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy will lead some kind of quasi-official agency whose goal is to restrict benefits and fire government workers en masse, in addition to serving Musk’s personal financial interests.

• Cutting programs for the poor. Republicans are already eyeing cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, the program that provides health coverage to low-income Americans. What they will ultimately look like is uncertain, but changes may also include work requirements, which are based on the presumption that poor people are lazy and in practice operate as little more than paperwork requirements, weaponizing bureaucracy to deprive people of benefits for which they qualify. 

• Slashing consumer protections. One of the incoming administration’s key economic priorities is to neuter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so banks and payday lenders can have an easier time screwing over consumers. “There will be a pretty significant change from the direction the agency has been going in, and I think in a positive way,” says a bank lobbyist whom Trump put in at the CFPB in his first term. And watch out for attempts to repeal consumer-friendly regulations put in place by the Biden administration on things like junk fees, requirements on airlines to be transparent about fees and promptly reimburse travelers for cancelled flights, the banning of most noncompete agreements, and the new “click to cancel” rule, which will require companies to make it easier to get out of a subscription or membership as it was to sign up for it. All could be up for elimination.

• A national sales tax on imported goods. Trump may or may not go ahead with the sweeping across-the-board tariffs on imported goods he promised during the campaign. But one way or another there will be a dramatic increase in tariffs, which essentially operate as a national sales tax on imports. Sales taxes are inherently regressive, hitting people with lower incomes harder. 

These will only be the most visible of the Trump administration’s actions; alongside them will be a thousand appointments and policy decisions that subvert the interests of ordinary people so that the rich can accumulate more riches. That’s not to mention the fact that the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority will continue to hand down one decision after another advancing the interests of the wealthy; among other things, they could soon declare the National Labor Relations Board, one of the few places in government where unions can (sometimes) get a fair shake, to be unconstitutional at the behest of Amazon and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

That will all be accompanied by the standard Republican economic menu of attempts to crush collective bargaining, opposition to increases in the minimum wage, efforts to limit access to health care, reduced oversight for Wall Street, and slashing regulations that protect consumers and anyone who enjoys breathing air or drinking water.

There’s a good reason why corporations continue to give the overwhelming majority of their contributions to Republican candidates: Like the billionaires who funded Trump’s campaign, they know that the “We’re the worker’s party now” talk is a scam, a joke they play on the gullible rubes. For all the claims that liberals are condescending elitists, nobody has more contempt for the working class, and working class Trump voters in particular, than the people who benefit from their votes. 

So next time you hear a Republican crow about the fact that they’re now the working class party, ask yourself this: What precisely are the Republican policies that place the interests of the working class ahead of the interests of the rich? Not just “Inflation is bad, and a Democrat was president during inflation!” or “We’re going to grow the economy, which is good for everyone.” But the places where a choice has to be made, and Republicans choose ordinary people over the wealthy. Can you come up with any?

Should Democrats be doing a better job appealing to working class voters? Absolutely. But that should never be used as an excuse to give Republicans a pass for the con they have been so successful at executing. And that’s exactly what’s happening in the media right now, because reporters are always more interested in strategy than reality, and more interested in intra-party sniping than in what was true yesterday and is still true today. So we get a hundred “Democrats Failing to Appeal to Working Class” stories and approximately zero “Republicans Advancing Interests of Wealthy” stories. 

But that’s what’s happening. If you want to know who they really are, watch what they do when they have power.