Trump is on Course to Decimate the American Middle Class. There has been a lot to process the past few weeks, and there has been so much to take in that it’s been easy to miss or forget a few things that caught our attention at a particular moment. The rapid fire series of events that ended with Democrats quickly coalescing around Vice President Harris simply blew everything else out of the water.
Now that the course forward is set, we should address how we clean up some of the toxic waste left by Trump, Vance and the rest of the unremarkable cast of the Republican National Convention. There is plenty to choose from, but a priority has to be rejecting and disputing the absurd claims that Trump, Vance and the Republicans are in it for working people.
Trump is a working class zero. It’s a joke to pretend he’s a working class hero. Trump is selling a dangerous lie that Democrats are going to have shut down firmly, factually and repeatedly from now until the election. It shouldn’t be that hard to expose the BS blue collar lip service as just another way to scam workers and hypnotize the MAGA cult. Trump and Vance’s insincere and absurd posture is an affront to the accomplishments of every Democratic White House on behalf of workers since the Clinton administration. The only thing Trump will deliver to working families is bluster and chaos, and Vance is his dark force multiplier.
Hat tip to Left of Center contributor Isaac Kaufer, a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, and a research specialist in analytics and communication integration, who came across an easy to read summary of Vance’s policy positions and greatest hits by topic. This is a great tool for quickly getting up to speed on Vance as we engage in discussions and outreach efforts aimed at electing Democrats. Now, if you want to discuss actual working class heroics, start with the Democrats’ three cornerstone pieces of middle class legislation signed into law by President Biden: the inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
As we’ve said before, the Biden-Harris approach to strengthening the middle class is built on investment in people, their businesses, their roads and buildings, and their access to prescient and valuable information, and the best training and education. Trump accomplished nothing like it for working people when he was president, and he has no ideas to match it going forward, because he is way outside his lane when it comes to understanding wage earners and middle class economics.
While we see right through the cow pucky populism that Trump and Vance spew, their lies and false promises unchecked can reach a lot of uninformed or misinformed voters. Consider the massive applause Vance received for this whopper (but nonetheless powerful line) in Milwaukee: “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.”
And who is that leader not in the pocket of big business? Trump, who has all but admitted he’s handing out markers to about 60 billionaires who are funding his campaign and legal expenses, and was caught outright offering to pimp his presidency for Big Oil in exchange for $1 billion?
Or is it Vance, the one-time apple of Appalachia turned Silicon Valley tech bro and protege of uber-rich darkside capitalist Peter Thiel and his sidekick Elon Musk? Once those two mad broligarchs (tip of cap to The Guardian for that one) got hold of the bright author, they sucked the bluegrass right out of that boy and wired him up for some serious Silicon Valley money-grubbing venture capitalism. Hillbilly Elegy suddenly became hillbilly ugly.
As was the case with the Trump tax cuts, when it's time to hand out the gold bars, the billionaires boys club will get the payday, while a working class flock that follows Trump will maybe get some scraps while they wait outside the door, but more likely will get nothing at all.
Trump’s favorite right wing think tank even put it in writing in a MAGA master plan called, Project 2025. The plan has been revealed to be so diabolical that a panicked Trump suddenly started to not know anything about it. The problem for Trump is that his running mate Vance, the bard of the broligarchs, wrote the foreword for a coming book by Kevin Roberts, who headed Project 2025.
Quoting Vance’s forward in Roberts’s book, Vox reports: “Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes, according to the book’s Amazon page. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
A lot has been written and said about Project 2025, and expect to hear more before the election. Trump has promised a lot of class warfare and bad times ahead on his own, but what makes Project 2025 unique is it puts in writing the plan for the richest Americans to force the middle class to pay the way and pretty much pick up the entire tab.
The Republicans have long proudly engaged in class warfare against the poorest and most economically vulnerable Americans, but Project 2025 breaks dangerous new ground by contending that class warfare aimed at the middle class is a necessary requisite to maintain and protect the ruling class. “Even if you agree with the far-right ideology this report espouses, the policies it advocates will very likely plunge the American economy into a death spiral,” writes accomplished business executive, philanthropist and wiseman Jeff Raikes in Fortune.
There is even more trouble brewing in Trump's billionaire boys boardroom. Trump has discovered that when you promise Big Oil you will help it by cutting electric vehicles and renewable energy, you tend to anger Musk, who’s Tesla’s are not rolling out the dealership showrooms at the moment (which is what happens when Musk continues to anger the consumer groups he needs to buy Teslas).
“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention. “Thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now and saving U.S. customers thousands and thousands of dollars per car.”
That doesn't sound very promising for Tesla at all, which has benefitted from EV tax credits among slumping Tesla sales. Trump claims Musk didn’t pressure him to tone down the anti-EV rhetoric, yet out of the blue he did just that only days later. “I’ll tell you, he’s never called me and said, could you lay off the electric car?” Trump told Fox News. “I love Elon. And I have to tell you this about this, he endorsed me. He announced he’s giving me $45 million a month. And yet, I’m against certain electrics.”
Musk gave Trump a pass, sort of, on the Big Oil quid pro quo to eliminate EV tax incentives, but the episode illuminates the volatility and thin layer of unity that exist in Trump’s billionaire boys club. "It would be devastating for our competitors, and it would hurt Tesla slightly but long term probably actually helps Tesla would be my guess," Musk said, at least admitting he’s just guessing.
Trump is not hiding that he is mobbed up with a bunch of rich scoundrels. They might pass as Bond film B-level villains that never made it past the screen test, but they should never be allowed to pass themselves off as fighters for American workers. That is a mask that needs to be ripped off Trump and Vance before more people start believing it.
Written by Ken Bazinet, a former White House correspondent, has covered three presidents and five presidential elections. Still writing, he works with organizations and individuals that focus on opening and expanding ballot access to Black, Latino, Native American, pro-worker and rural voters. He is third generation organized labor.