Will tariffs finally break Trump's hypnotic hold on working people?
There are opportunities and tripping points
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
I’m currently on a train to Washington, DC (yes, I made the 5:25 am departure time) to conduct major interviews for two big MPU stories about DOGE, the disastrous attacks on federal workers (including what’s covered in this Supreme Court case), and the Trump administration’s effort to end workers’ rights altogether.
As the White House continues to drown the nation in the toxic sludge of Project 2025 and the whims of the syphilitic would-be dictator, events that outraged the public a month ago are fading from view. I’m determined to not let that happen again.
Speaking of, I have more live stream interviews to schedule, and I'm thinking of other ways to use the video format that can provide additional insights and fun conversations. I’m no newscaster, but perhaps impromptu streams when there’s big news in my wheelhouse would be helpful — newsletters take a long time to write, and with so much constantly happening, things fall through the cracks. Thoughts?
Today, we’re looking at the impact of tariffs, public opinion, and right-wing spin. Then, it’s on to one of the most important battles happening outside of Washington.
Note: Unlike many progressive advocacy journalists, I’ve gone fully independent, with no special advertising deals or close relationships with powerful politicians to temper what I write. My only loyalty is to you, the reader, and to the cause of progress — economic justice, democracy, human rights, and standing up to oligarchs.
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If there is one definite takeaway from last year’s election, it’s that the fractured media and online ecosystem has made it almost impossible to gauge the kind of information people are imbibing or accurately track public opinion. The funhouse of lying politicians, cable news, podcasts, live streams, and the demented influencers promoted by rigged social algorithms can manipulate reality until it is unrecognizable.
A global plague that has killed well over a million Americans? It was all planned, the masterwork of the evil Dr. Fauci, who worked with the Deep State to take away Americans’ freedoms and inject them with the poison that only $68 liquified dandelion root can cure.
A violent insurrection meant to overthrow the duly elected American government? It was a hoax! And a setup! And a perfectly beautiful and peaceful assembly of patriots who were victimized by the deep state.
A series of haphazardly calculated taxes on products and parts imported from around the world that trigger trade wars and send the economy into deep stagflation recession without solving any problems they purport to address? Remains to be seen!
Donald Trump’s improvised tariffs — which went into effect this present the biggest challenge yet to the far-right spin machine. Imposed without provocation, they have already sent the stock market crashing and begun to cripple businesses big and small, freezing supply chains and hiring, and canceling investments. Anyone with a 401K is getting creamed, cars are piling up and already driving up prices, and anybody who runs or works for a small business is watching the bottom fall out.
There is nobody to blame but Trump, and his administration continues to try out new excuses almost by the hour, hoping that one sticks. As of Sunday night, none of them seemed to be catching on with the public.
The new Reuters/Ipsos poll found 57% of Americans do not support the tariffs, while a whopping 74% of respondents anticipate that they will cause prices to increase. And in a new Navigator poll, 55% of respondents disapproved of the way Trump is handling the economy, a 13-point drop from late February.
True believers continue to back Trump — Navigator found 91% of self-described MAGA voters back his economic approach, and even 67% of the non-MAGA Republicans (an increasingly rare breed) back his handling of the economy. But beyond that core of support, who are more religious fanatics than political supporters, the skepticism and disapproval run high.
Whereas Trump can usually count on cable news and an army of right-wing influencers to have his back, that firewall is fading to some degree, as well. Ben Shapiro, a pipsqueak culture warrior who holds more “classic” conservative pro-business views, excoriated the administration today, and Stephen Miller blew a gasket defending the policy on Fox News, one of the few places where he isn’t greeted like a giant dump in a swimming pool.
The one dangerous argument
This may change by tomorrow, but the justification at this moment in time is that Trump’s tariffs are a bid to revive American manufacturing and christen a new “Golden Age” of economic abundance. A new strain of the original Make America Great Again nostalgia that Trump sold in 2016, it promises a return to a flourishing mid-century where people didn’t have to think about civil rights and factory jobs could lift them into the middle class.
It’s also an easy to grasp concept that offers tangible goals, which is far more effective than excuses about rebalancing trade, funding tax cuts for the rich, or just getting back at other countries for alleged underhandedness.
As such, this is probably the most politically viable of the explanations, especially with the working and middle class men who have become Trump’s most loyal backers. It also helps that it’s the one for which some labor unions, including the UAW (cautiously and as it applies to autos) and the Teamsters (without reservation), are expressing some support.
There’s a lot of appeal here, because America has been hollowed out and it’s important for a lot of reasons that the country start building things again (as I note in the piece below). The jobs are needed, communities need the secondary economic boosts, and when crisis hits, we need a domestic supply chain. Autoworkers like this idea and many people who work with their hands are hoping this can pan out. What’s frustrating is that Trump is hardly the first person to make this a priority, he just has a special way of erasing history, doing things in the stupidest way possible, and getting away with it.
The UAW also backed Joe Biden’s plan to reindustrialize America, which was far more logical, legal, and actually beginning to yield results, with hundreds of more factories in development. The Biden record is what makes this explanation truly maddening: Trump has been on the warpath against the actual investments born of the various Biden infrastructure laws, and has succeeded in stopping many of the through his various executive orders and tariffs.
Now he’s claiming that his disastrous policy, which has also roiled markets and frozen capital, is going to restore American industry, when at best it might prompt new factories many years down the line, given how long these things take to get moving and how little money is going to be available to build this stuff in a global recession.
It’s utterly idiotic, like publicly celebrating the Xs and Os for a convoluted Hail Mary ladder play after deliberately fumbling the ball in the opponent’s red zone and allowing them to recover the ball and run it all the way back for a touchdown. But the power of the right-wing media machine is that they believe that this could work, and based on some new polling, perhaps they’re not entirely off-base.
A new study found a huge gap between the amount people hear about things in the news and their actual understanding of the topic at hand. The study focused on what multicultural (ie non-white and/or queer and/or non-Christian) Americans make of the early days of the Trump administration, considering his improvement with all demographics in the last election, but it polled everybody. The relevant results:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): 65% of multicultural Americans and 68% of non-multicultural Americans could not provide the correct definition of DEI. The high rate of incorrect responses suggests significant misinformation or misunderstanding and there is significant opportunity for advertising campaigns to educate these constituencies
Tariffs: Despite over 60% of all Americans claiming they have heard a lot or some about tariffs, 32% of multicultural Americans and 21% of non-multicultural Americans could not provide the correct definition of tariffs
U.S. Government Budget Cuts: 35% of multicultural Americans and 33% of non-multicultural Americans do not understand the effects of recent U.S. government budget cuts. 14% of multicultural Americans incorrectly stated that recent budget cuts to the U.S. government have cut down costs of groceries and rent.
DOGE: More than half of Americans across all segments have heard a lot or some about DOGE, but 51% of multicultural Americans and 38% of non-multicultural Americans did not provide the correct definition of DOGE.
It’s this uncertainty that the right-wing misinformation apparatus tends to exploit, creating a sense of unease and dread around a subject with extreme (and often invented) examples without ever providing a solid underlying explanation for the thing they want people to dread.
Trump and his goons want to turn this into a battle over who is most patriotic and aligned with working Americans, turning suffering into virtue and evidence of national pride. Their backs are up against the wall, but the ace up their sleeve is their understanding of liberal media and the Democratic tendency for smugness and embrace of the elite. They’ve been able to turn competence and expertise into hallmarks of conspiracy and elitism — this is how their foray into the anti-medicine wellness grift world has become such a success — and they’ll weaponize every reaction that can suit their narrative.
Ironically, this means that a White House built to service the ultra-wealthy is probably licking its lips at the backlash from the billionaires on Wall Street who supported Trump and are now crying foul as their portfolios meltdown.
Of course, the schadenfreude of seeing ghouls like Bill Ackman being forced to gulp down shovels of shit while publicly whining over their financial losses and feelings of betrayal is unbelievably satisfying, and I personally would love to see a live stream of these baby tantrums played on a mega-screen in Times Square. But amplifying Wall Street’s messages, whether they be sober bank analysts lecturing about global displeasure and market uncertainty or the laments of the loathsome ultra-rich, only plays into the narrative that Trump sees as his salvation.
For all their arrogance, the irony is that people Ackman were total marks like the core Trump voters they so likely despise. They thought they were special, and were thus believed that they would be an exception to Trump’s lifelong habit of stabbing people in the back when it suits his needs. Unfortunately, a decade into his political dominance, there are far too many voters that feel the same way. I’m helping to run a proactive effort to highlight all the harms being done to working people, but what this ultimately may come down to is whether people believe their bank accounts or think those are fake news, too.
The labor movement is going to have to be essential to excising us from the grips of oligarchy and fascism, so it’s there are few projects more critical than replenishing the membership and rebuilding the power of unions. The fuselage of attacks aimed at organized labor by both Trump and right-wing state governments should make this a true non-negotiable for any Democratic elected official, especially those with national ambitions.
So why the hell is Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis refusing to support a bill that would give workers a fair shot at organizing, not to mention using right-wing talking points to do so?
I’ve covered this a lot, but as a reminder, the Colorado Worker Protection Act would finally remove the unique second hurdle that unionizing workers must clear for full representation. Like everywhere else, they have to win a union election, which is hard enough in an era of rampant union-busting (and about to get much, must harder). But in Colorado, they also have to win a second election, with more than 75% of the vote, for the union to receive mandatory dues from the workers it is required to represent.
It is unbelievably expensive for unions to operate, and they rely on dues from the people who they represent to pay lawyers, organizers, negotiators, and other costs that come with negotiating better contracts and protecting workers’ rights. In so-called “right to work” states, unions are prohibited from getting automatic dues, which deprives them of essential funding and keeps them almost irrelevant. Colorado functions as one of those states by default, and it takes surviving a second campaign of union-busting and winning a super-super-majority for workers to have a fully functioning union.
With just a month left in the state’s legislative session, firm Democratic control of both the House and state Senate should mean that plans are already being made for the CWPA big signing ceremony. Its passage through the legislature won’t be a problem, but Polis’s insistence on a “compromise” with business groups, who have no incentive to play ball right now, is putting the whole thing in danger.
Polis has long talked a big game about supporting labor unions but spent his governorship keeping them on a tight leash. In statements about this bill, he continues to say that he wants to “protect worker voices,” the classic employer and right-wing talking point against organizing, and simply refuses to budge on what is an overwhelmingly popular proposal.
The coalition of progressives, unions, social justice organizations, and Democratic politicians are starting to grow increasingly concerned that this bill is going to fall short, which would be catastrophic for the labor movement, for working people, and for the effort to defeat fascism. It’s frankly untenable for a Democratic Party to be run by people who can’t stand by workers or follow the most basic philosophy that has underpinned the entire party’s reason for existence.
Polis has national ambitions, and if he doesn’t move on this, it will have to be his scarlet letter, disqualifying him from any prominent leadership role.
This isn’t just a battle for unions, it’s a battle to salvage and rebuild a true coalition of forward-looking, solidarity-minded, grassroots-sprung working and middle-class Americans that can wrest back control of the country and save it from the edge of the abyss.
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