Opinion | Trump Is No Longer Even Pretending to Champion the Working Class

The most consequential moment from Donald Trump’s glitchy interview with Elon Musk on Monday came during a discussion of government cost-cutting. “Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk, before launching, apropos of nothing, into a reverie about how Musk dominates his employees. “They go on strike,” said Trump. “I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone,’ and you are the greatest.”

Trump’s sympathy with plutocrats over unions is not a surprise, given both his record in office and his desperate desire for the approval and admiration of other billionaires. Though the ex-president made successful electoral appeals to the working class — particularly the white working class — his record on labor was that of a standard conservative Republican.

He appointed union busters to the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that enforces labor law. His Department of Labor reversed the “persuader” rule, which had forced transparency on companies waging anti-union propaganda campaigns. His Supreme Court appointees dealt a severe blow to public sector unions in the Janus decision, an outcome Trump celebrated. His signature policy accomplishment was a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich.

Nevertheless, Trump’s jocular delight in a centibillionaire’s war on labor shocked some of his populist sympathizers. Sean O’Brien, who last month was the first Teamsters president to speak at a Republican National Convention, told Politico, “Firing workers for organizing, striking and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism.” The conservative writer and editor Sohrab Ahmari, one of the rare figures in the new right to take organized labor seriously, wrote, “By cheering Musk’s brutal treatment of his workers, the Trump campaign has sadly vindicated those who saw its pro-worker rhetoric as a mere facade.”

It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at anyone gullible enough to imagine that Trump was ever serious curbing the influence of concentrated wealth. This is a man, after all, who consistently stiffed his own workers, and who ran a fake university that scammed his economically vulnerable fans. But if Trump’s oligarchic orientation hasn’t changed, the way he talks about the economy has. “Why has Trump stopped attacking big business?” asked a recent essay by Matt Stoller, a progressive writer and activist who’s been willing to make common cause with right-wing populists like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri in the name of fighting corporate power.

Stoller compared the language Trump used in his first presidential campaign, when he regularly attacked Wall Street and corporate America, to his more recent speeches. “In terms of what he promises, he’s mostly stopped challenging big corporations, except in cultural terms acceptable to Wall Street,” wrote Stoller. You could see this in the meandering speech about economics that Trump delivered on Wednesday afternoon. At one point, he invited the Wall Street investor Scott Bessent — who, as it happens, is the former chief investment officer of George Soros’s Soros Fund Management — to the podium, calling him “one of the greatest on all of Wall Street respected by everybody.” He said next to nothing about corporate greed, workers’ rights, or breaking up Big Tech.