Trump, Vance, and The Republican Anti-Worker Playbook

I think Eisenhower was president at that time. Things are moving quickly. Kamala Harris is now a freight train. Did you see any of the footage of the rally in Atlanta that she held? Yeah, Magnum Stallion.

Holy shit. And it's the one thing I think that would, I almost think more than any policy or any discrepancy on economics or anything else, the thing that would bother Donald Trump the most is a giant arena filled with enthusiastic supporters having a party. Fun.

Popularity is my thing. Like, I think he doesn't even give a shit about the election anymore. He just wants to be like, my crowd was bigger.

But yeah, it's a totally different thing. How did the people feel about last week? Everybody's good? The viewers, the listeners? One thing that did happen this week, John, that we wanted to ask you about was you were back down in D.C.

on Friday with some K2 veteran staff. Yes. What's going on? Well, it's, so. the PACT Act, for those who don't know, the PACT Act changed for veterans, not just of global war on terror, but Vietnam and all that.

It changed the presumptions for toxic exposures for a lot of veterans. And it does a great job. And they really are working hard to implement it. And they've done a lot of great work. The Biden administration, Secretary McDonough at the VA, they really have worked hard.

There are loopholes within it. One particular one is this base, K2,, which was kind of the tip of the spear of the global war on terror in 2001.. It was this old Soviet base in Uzbekistan that had housed chemical weapons. There was talk that it was a traffic station for yellow cake smuggling. Like, there's all kinds of shit there.

So when the troops first landed, they found radiation levels in the soil 44,000 times higher than what it should be. They found a chemical contamination site. They found PFAS and dioxins, all the general shit that's like this toxic goo. But K2 was a unicorn of toxicity. It was a Superfund's Superfund site.

And almost immediately, I mean, people were nauseous, vomiting, like that started right away. And then the health problems snowballed and persisted. A lot of them were helped by PACT Act. But there are a few with these what are considered multi-symptom, weird, neurological, osteo….

I think the holdup is. DOD doesn't want to acknowledge that they were exposed to Yellowcake. DOD keeps wanting to say that it's depleted uranium. Or they don't want to acknowledge multi-symptom. And so I think that's where the rub is.

They were exposed to vanilla extract. It was nothing. So all that stuff is, you know, look, those guys are the K2 Group, Stronghold Foundation. Mark Jackson has been on top of this doing that. Matt Eppardling.

Like these guys, have been working on it for years. We've been trying to get them in to get this resolved. We thought we had it. We went down there. We were called back down to D.C.

for a meeting with the Secretary. And what he said was, we've looked into it. I do have the authority, but I haven't decided yet whether or not I'm going to use it. I think what the VA Secretary is saying, well, there may be more data that's coming along. And we're like, it's 23 years.

Like, don't make this group victims of the lack of data that you will never have. Yeah. So you can imagine, everybody walked out of the meeting pretty crestfallen. And now it's, you know, you can't give up. So we keep on.

I'm trying to get that group into. There is a White House Veterans Task Force trying to get them in with that group. So, you know, look, I always remain frustrated, but hopeful. And the group that's working on it, they're so dedicated and wonderful. And there's this fellow, Nick Nichols, who was there and who did the testing.

And it was his whistleblower testimony, I think, a year and a half ago, that reopened all this. Wow. I mean, we've been lucky. The AP has been on it. A reporter named Catherine Herridge, who did like four years of reporting at CBS.

And she's been remarkable in terms of dedication to it, but also with getting the reports from DOD. I mean, these FOIA reports from DOD show that Department of Defense knew that there was enriched uranium there. If you look at the surveillance photos, which Catherine had gotten a hold of, it says there's a giant sign that says danger, radiation. And they had to rope it off. Danger, chemical weapons.

And they had to rope it off. The problem was they had earthmovers that were moving all of that soil into berms that they were all sleeping on. So they've all been exposed to radon coming up through the ground and all kinds of other shit. And it's, I mean, they have the pictures. But yet more data is coming, John.

And they're looking for data. Like a lot of these folks, unfortunately, have already died. And their families are left without the DIC benefits that come through VA. So any support that we can give to the K2 folks, you know, call your, I don't know who to call. Congress, people, White House, VA secretary, whatever you need to do, let's get it done.

But thank you for asking about that. Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's been wild to watch. But we're getting there. But meanwhile, we've got two great guests that are going to talk about this sort of pivot to economic populism that somehow the Republicans have taken on, even though they forgot to tell their judges and their think tanks and their legislators and everybody else.

So let's get to them.

And so we welcome our guests for this discussion. Stephen Greenhouse, labor and workplace reporter at the New York Times for 19 years, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, author of the book Beaten Down, Worked Up, the Past, Present, and Future of American Labor. And Heather Cox Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America. Guys, thank you, first of all, so much for joining us. There's so much to talk about.

The Republicans nominated as their vice president. a populist hero. He has a beard and a maw. maw. So clearly he is for the working man.

And he has said, I'm going to read you a quick quote. We're done, ladies and gentlemen. Catering to Wall Street will commit to the working man. That was the Republicans at their convention. I want to ask you, first, Stephen, and then we'll go to Heather.

Have the Republicans told their judges or legislatures or think tanks of this new switch to economic populism? Because it doesn't seem that the policies and court decisions that have been rendered these past, I'm going to go with 50 years, have gone along with the populist route. So, Stephen, what are your thoughts?

The judges they've appointed to the Supreme Court and other courts are quite anti-worker, very anti-union. And the Supreme Court, there's a recent study saying that the three Trump appointees to the Supreme Court are the most pro-business justices over the last century, of 57 judges surveyed.

It would throw them off of health coverage. It would raise prices.

You know, everybody's talking about Project 2025 and what that's going to mean to the country, and what are the things that the Republicans might institute. I want to talk about Project 1980.. 1980 to 1984.. Reagan comes in. We had a labor economy.

Reagan came in and deregulated Wall Street and many of the other corporate entities, and we have since shifted to an investment economy. The labor economy is now an investment economy, and people that invested, people that are in finance, people that are in equities, did really well over these last 50 years, but labor has been left behind. So I want to ask Heather, that switchover of the Republican Party from sort of more labor with the Democrats to a more investment economy, and Trump has vowed to continue that. He wants to cut corporate tax rates to 15% from 20%. He had already cut it.

So, what direction are we going in here? Well,

And so, what I think is so interesting when you bring up the 1980s is that if you have this disaffected group of people, how do you know which way they're going to jump? That is, in the 1890s, they jumped in part to antisemitism, but also in part to economic reform. And I think one of the things that's really important about the 1980s and the period since then is the control of the rhetoric and the language around which politicians.

steer that populist disaffection. And what the Republicans have done so enormously effectively is to say, hey, you might have a problem, but it's not us rich guys. It's the, you know, the minority taking your job.

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Let's get back into it. So you're suggesting that the difficulty here, and Steven will get to you in terms of separating populism from economic populism, is that it seems like the lever of populism is oftentimes nationalism. This fervor of all right, we're going to draw the wagons in, America first, you know, you had that in the 1920s as well, where you look for scapegoats that allow maybe the ruling class to avoid any kind of suspicion, find a scapegoat at the lower end of the table, put all the problems on them, and still get away with it. So, Steven, are we making a mistake, when we talk about populism, to not focus on really economic populism, and how do we separate what is best for workers? Because even when you think about unionizing, you also have to recognize unions can become corrupt too, and sometimes they can be anti-workers.

So how do we draw those distinctions, Steven?

He says, you know, blame the immigrants, you know, he bashes the Chinese, he bashes, you know, elitists like you, Heather, and me, and it makes people feel good, like, oh, I like that, I could blame all my problems on those bad guys, the Chinese, the immigrants, but it's really doing nothing to help workers, and it ticks me off that, you know, Trump poses as a friend of workers. I remember, you know, when he was running for president in 2016,, he would tell autoworkers in Michigan and Ohio, don't worry, if I'm elected, no plants will close on my watch. And then, you know, this huge General Motors plant closed in Lordstown in 2019 when he was president on his watch. and what does he do? He doesn't blame General Motors, he blames the United Autoworkers Union and Dave Green, the president of the local, who fought his behind off to try to save the plant.

you know, part of that shows that Trump is is very anti-union. He, you know, time and again he like kicks unions.

because if you look at the data, I think if you work the same job in a right-to-work state, you earn 3-3.5% less than a worker would in a state that's not right-to-work.

You also get first a government that is protecting black rights in the American South and then the right of black men to vote in the American South. This is.

people who are attacking their black neighbors based on issues of race. So in 1871, white Southerners, white, unreconstructed Southerners, there are a number of white Southerners who are like, we just want to get rid of the rich guys. This is cool with us. But the unreconstructed ones say, hey, we never had a problem with race. That was never an issue.

Really? Same people. Same people, by the way. But they say this was never a problem. What we don't want is these poor, uneducated people voting.

Because the poor, uneducated black men will vote for leaders. And at this point, they weren't really concerned about black people sitting in legislatures, although that's going to come by the early 1870s. They're going to use their political power to get leaders elected who are going to vote for things like roads and schools and hospitals. And the only way you can pay for that is through taxes. And who has all the money in the American South is white guys.

And you can see this thread through American history. Think of the way that the Republicans turned against Brown versus Board of Education. And Eisenhower sending troops into Little Rock. They said, they didn't say, there was plenty of racist stuff too, but their arguments in places like the National Review were, this is your tax dollars that are there trying to get these undeserving black people into these schools.

Stephen, is there a vulnerability there for Democrats? Because what do the Democrats say? We've got to tax the billionaires. We've got to make people pay their fair share. But if you can't connect the tax dollars that are being raised to value for taxpayers, right?

So if you do have a bunch of working class people that are paying into the tax system, but they're not realizing to your point earlier, Stephen, about the things that they would need in their lives, childcare, healthcare, eldercare, those types of things. If they don't see the value coming back from their dollars, then what good is raising taxes on corporations? What good is raising taxes on billionaires if you don't think the return on that is going to be any good? And is that a place where the Democrats have to shore up their position?

But when Trump and the Republicans say, we want to have tax cuts, and we're going to help you, the tax cuts that were enacted by Trump, they gave the average American household less than $500, yet the top 1% get a $60,000 tax cut, as if they needed all that money.

in the Supreme Court, John, back in 1977, there was a case where some teachers in Detroit, Michigan, said, we don't want to pay any dues to our union, you know, because it violates our First Amendment rights, and we want to be free riders. We want to get union benefits without paying. And the Supreme Court voted unanimously with many conservative members. So that shows how-.

And that shows, you know, how conservative the Supreme Court has. And since Alito has arrived on the court, it's grown far more conservative, far more anti-union, far more pro-business.

We gave billions back to the banks to make them whole again. People got foreclosed on. Our economy tanked. We went into a huge recession. In the pandemic, we chose demand-side stimulus.

We gave everybody money. We recovered better than any other country did. The economy snapped back. Doesn't it show that demand-side stimulus is, at the very least, more efficient?

That is not so much what are the leaders talking about, but what do the followers accept? And this, I think, is central to a much larger conversation about the United States, because, of course, for right-to-work laws, although they really take off in the 1950s, they tap into the idea that if, in fact, you want wage protections and hour protections and all the sorts of things that really were being decimated in states like Arizona, they tapped into this longer history of Americans wanting to believe that, by God, they were doing it all on their own, even though they never have. So one of the things that really-.

The people like me have a story that says, no, no, no, no, it's the rich guys. But if you look right now, you're seeing the rise of people like Sean Fain of the UAW, the president of the UAW, who is talking, he is both incorporating the idea of Christianness, if you will. He talks about Christian values, almost a social Christian value, and the need to protect the ability of workers to have the kind of economic security that Steve's talking about. And also says, wait a minute, we've skewed this entire system. So I think one of the things we're seeing, you asked where we were going, is we are definitely seeing the breaking apart of the Republican project from between 1980 until 2021.

But we're also seeing a new kind of language. And it's taken a while for people like Biden to get to the point where they're not just saying, hey, we're going to help the little guy, but also saying, and we're going to tax those people at the very top. And you saw FDR do a similar shift. And you're seeing a lot of Americans, I think, who were in the group of people who were in trouble in the 1980s and forward, getting to find their own voices, in part, thanks to the rise of the internet and the ability to go around the gatekeepers that really managed to highlight the Republican story about America for 40 years and to silence the populist story. Now you're seeing the populist story.

And on the one hand, some people have become virulently sexist and racist. And that's the story that they're clinging to. And some people are saying, no, we can rebuild this country in a new, exciting way.

Is that a model that can be taken on through these other corporations?

On the other hand, the no is, well, it's not enough because workers don't have a voice. It's so important over history in the United States and elsewhere, to assure greater economic justice, for workers not to be stepped on, for workers to have a voice at work. And that's why laws that encourage the formation of unions, laws that encourage collective bargaining, have made such a difference. And, Heather's the historian, I'm not, but after World War II, American companies were going like gangbusters. Europe was flat on its back, Japanese industry was flat on its back, and United States Steel and General Motors and Ford and Chrysler, they were doing amazingly well.

And workers, you know, we didn't have a middle class, yet. Workers were really doing poorly. And workers unionized and went on strike and pressured the capitalists and said, it ain't fair. You know, you're making so much money and we're struggling, and we're the folks who make your profits, who make your cars, who make your steel. And they won these amazing contracts that created the middle class.

And unions. now, you know, Sean Fain is basically saying the same thing what union leaders were saying after World War II, that we're not getting our fair share. Companies are making record profits, the stock market's at record levels, productivity has risen to record levels, yet wages are flat. And labor is really standing up again, more than it has in a long time. And Sean Fain, you know, led this historic victory strike last fall by the United Auto Workers against GM Ford and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler.

And labor's saying, not only do we need a seat at the table, not only do workers need a seat at the table, whether it's Starbucks or Amazon, or Trader Joe's or Apple, but this old idea that all we deserve is a 2% a year raise is BS. You know, inflation was 10%, we deserve our fair share. And one of the crazy things-.

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We're back. I mean, these are pendulum swings, right? You have the robber barons, and then you have the New Deal that creates a safety net, and then you have this post-World War II boom, and now you've got this Reagan-era deregulation and all these things. It swings back and forth in terms of workers, and then it goes more pro-business. What brings it back to the...

How does the pendulum swing back now, Heather?

Once you got the fall of the Berlin Wall and you got the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was this sense that you no longer had to worry about that, that as long as you spread capitalism, you would also be spreading democracy. Of course, where that's ended us up is a place where authoritarians are on the rise all over the country. And all over the world. Yes. I'm sorry, I meant that, all over the world.

And maybe that's the thing we have to address.

They have good educations. They have skills. Many of them have money. They also have, for the first time in our history, 20 to 30 years after their children have left, or they've gotten as far as they want to in their careers, to get involved in the public sphere. And that, at the same time that they're recognizing that their daughters and granddaughters have fewer rights than they did.

And I think that throws a monkey wrench into both populism and also into how we will reconstruct a future. Because I don't think, at least in the United States, and I know other countries jumping to mind, I think that changes the entire way we're going to be looking at the issues of the American story, for example, or the issue of who should have a say, or the issue of equal rights going forward. And I think it's one of the things driving the extraordinary fury on the American right right now against things like childless cat ladies.

And that's one of the reasons there's so much enthusiasm about Kamala Harris. She's been leading the fight. One of the things that really gets me is when I really have to rack my brains to think of what exactly did Trump do for workers? And I can think of one and a half things. Yes, the North American Free Trade Agreement was way too friendly to corporations and didn't do enough to protect workers.

And people blame Bill Clinton for all this, blame the Democrats. It was negotiated by a Republican, you know, first President Bush. Bill Clinton wanted to be a good bipartisan guy and he got it passed through the Senate. Overwhelmingly, it was Republicans who voted for it in Congress, not Democrats, but the Democrats get all the blame. But Trump, the one thing I will most praise him for is that he renegotiated NAFTA.

So it's much friendlier to unions, much friendlier to workers. And the half a thing where I say Trump did absolutely nothing to raise the minimum wage. I think he's such a chicken because he's worried, well, if I call for a higher minimum wage, I'm going to piss off my business supporters. And if I oppose a higher minimum wage, then I'm going to... So, like he's been mummed.

The great, courageous Donald Trump is just too scared to... But he has, he was campaigning in Nevada the other day, right? And he said... No taxes on tips. Yeah, no taxes on tips.

Like, where did that come from? He says he got it from speaking to a waiter. No, I'm sure one of his, someone in the brain trust, said this would be a great way to win votes of the tens of thousands of hotel housekeepers and waiters in Nevada.

But I say it's only half a pro worker thing because so many waiters and housekeepers, they don't earn enough money to even pay income taxes.

Globalization and automation decimated, I think, the American middle class, the factory workers. It really did have a terribly corrosive effect on people's ability to have stable manufacturing jobs or stable, you know, and all the support jobs that go along with those sorts of things. So the changes in whether it was Amazon or factories being able to go overseas and all those other things was devastating. And I don't think the Democrats recognized the devastation fast enough or with enough empathy, because they would always say things like, we'll send you back to school and you could be a coder. We'll teach you how to be a coder.

And they'd be like, well, I kind of dug what I was doing and I don't think I want to be a coder. And I think that was a real weakness and one that they've had a really tough time overcoming. Heather?

And the fact that the Democrats felt that they were unable to make the sorts of protections for the workers, but also, I mean, it sounds like we're just talking about unionized workers. And of course, that's not at all what we're talking about. We're talking about people who have been left behind.

Anybody who stands against him is an anarchist, right?

And, you know, the guy is sort of like back behind his desk with long hair going, that's not how the world works. And every time something goes wrong, you can watch this. They pull them out and they're like, hey, look, we found one from the past who's going to tell us what. But so I think that that has limited options. And again, the breakdown of Fox News because of the lawsuit against it, the fact that Rush Limbaugh died in 2021 and didn't give those talking points to everybody on the right and the rest of the media didn't follow suit with those talking points, I think, has opened up the ability for us to have a larger conversation.

And then, of course, with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying very upfront that the loss of our supply chains to other countries is a national security issue. The loss of our manufacturing to other countries is a national security issue. You know, the fact that we've had a very few people, very few corporations being able to monopolize baby formula, for example, but ever so many other things, is a national security issue. That's happened. That's made them able to reshore manufacturing and to reshore supply chains, which Buttigieg has done really, really well.

And also to launch lawsuits against people like Amazon. to say, you know, the idea that as long as prices are getting lower, it's good for the American people is not the case. We've got to make sure it's good for workers and good for national security, and good for consumers as well. So it seems like there's a lot of things breaking apart right now. And one of the things I'm really interested in is trying to make sure that the conversation that we engage going forward is much fairer and that doesn't have this sort of cookie cutter smashed down onto it so that for 40 years we're locked into something.

And, you know, there are many, you know, only one third, 40 percent of Americans go to college. And a lot of working class families said, I can't afford to send my kids to college. You know, Barack Obama is really aloof. And I think that was one of Obama's biggest mistakes. You know, the Democrats did try very hard to provide much more money for retraining, much money for unemployment insurance for people who lost job to foreign trade.

And the Republicans kept blocking it. But the Democrats get blamed for not doing enough. Now, as Heather said, Joe Biden got the message. Right.

He borrowed Bernie Sanders' idea for a while to make the first two years of college free. I mean, Biden gets that. there isn't enough economic opportunity for the typical American family.

But in your guys' mind, is the pendulum swinging back? And do both of these parties offer anything positive to labor and the working people in the country at this point?

We really need a country that's based on the good of everybody, especially those people who are hardworking and trying just to put food on the table and have their kids safe and educated, rather than saying, you know, we can turn it all over to the Silicon Valley billionaires and they will treat us little people well.

If you try to pass a paid leave bill, which so many American families support, 80% to 20%, overwhelmingly, you know, the billionaires, the corporations will block it. They'll say it's a horrible employer mandate. It's going to get in the way of the free market. We can't have that. We can't raise the minimum wage.

That will gum up the works for corporations, which are already, you know, have maximum profits.

Really interesting stuff. So I appreciate it.

Like, it so brings into focus how we get to this current moment and how we can get out of it.

And I really feel like sometimes I wish I had, like a pocket historian. Like, that's what they should do. A pocket Doris Kearns Goodwin. A pocket Heather Cox Richardson. Like Siri.

And whenever you're talking about something, it can be like, you know, they used to say the same thing about Andrew Carnegie. They said he couldn't be stopped. He was the bad guy. You're like, who?

I thought it was very, very fascinating conversation there. And boy, do they know their shit. When Stephen starts throwing out Supreme Court cases and quoting the thing, I was just like, I'm just going to go get a drink of water. He's killing it. Yeah.

The news keeps coming fast and furious. Yeah. So that's that. Brittany, the socials are going? Oh, yeah, we are there.

We're getting some really good responses, John. Actually, do you want to hear some of the questions we've got? Sure.

And I'm like, oh, I really think that would be like, I'd last like 20 minutes. And then, all of a sudden, I'd be like,

But so when you're doing those things, I find it very discomforting. I don't care for it. But I do it because.

I think I should suffer. I think I've earned that. I think we've both seen you do it. I know. Is it uncomfortable for you guys to watch?

Brittany, you've seen it a lot.

It was like, you know, in 2011,, Jon Stewart called me the devil incarnate. Is he going to do that on the show? And Brittany has to be like, I don't think so. No, probably not. He may call you that, but in jest.

So Brittany had to put me on the phone with Larry Summers. Yeah. Before he came on the show to allay his concerns. And I generally do the Costanza in those situations, which is what is the opposite of what you're supposed to do? So he said, you know, are those your feelings?

And I was like, yeah, they are. But, you know, I still don't, I don't mind having the conversation. I really disagree with you on almost everything, but I'm certainly, I'd be open to talking about it. And he was like, OK, that's all I wanted to know. And then he was like, great, let's do it.

Yeah. My favorite part is, you've had to do those calls a couple of times throughout our time working together. And the best is when Jon calls after and will be like, I don't know if I just helped or hurt the situation. I don't think they're coming. But for Larry Summers, that conversation was unfortunately very uncomfortable, but I thought pretty great.

Yeah, I think a lot of people did. Oh, well, not Apple.

Not the people we were working for, but the other people who were not. They didn't think it was particularly great. But yeah, but that's that's fantastic. OK, next question. Yes.

How can I start performing stand up comedy if I have terrible social anxiety? Oh, I don't know.

So, you know, I don't know enough about social anxiety to know if stand up comedy would trigger that, because, in truth, stand up is not that social. Like, I'm very introverted. So one of the reasons I like doing stand up was that it's one of the reasons I like bartending. I didn't have. it's like.

you can be out, ish, but you're not actually out. You have a job to do and you can focus on that and you don't really have to talk to anybody other than taking orders, giving orders. So it's not. and stand up is, oddly enough, very similar. Like Friday and Saturday night.

What are you doing? You go into that party, you're doing those things. I got to go do a gig. I got to work. You're social with the other comics, but you don't really have much to do with the audience other than in a performative way.

So I actually think for social anxiety, stand up's not a terrible business to be in, even though it may seem like a paradox. If that does that make sense?

And remember how, like you guys would go? And you guys would drink and have a great time? Yeah. And then you guys would be like, John, are you coming? And I'd be like,

uh, sure. But then I wouldn't. Yeah.

Sure. That's social anxiety. That's me. But all done. Tell people to keep going with the socials.

What are the socials? What are the things? We are Twitter, at Weekly Show, Pod. Instagram and threads, we are Weekly Show Podcast. TikTok, we are Weekly Show Podcast.

And the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on YouTube. Come on! As always, thank you so much. This has been the Weekly Show. Thanks to Lead Producer, Lauren Walker.

Producer, Brittany Mametovic. Video Editor and Engineer, Rob Vitolo, who, by the way, is just kicking crazy as, like everything is so locked in when we jump in. Same with Audio Editor and Engineer, Nicole Boyce. You guys are killing it. Research and Associate Producer, Jillian Spear, as always, arming me with the best information known to man.

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