How Trump’s manufacturing strategy proves he doesn’t care about workers
When I was growing up, I would often hear the adults around me talking about how all the white people they knew seemed confused about why Black people were so angry. I laugh about it now, not just because it’s funny. But also because, whenever I heard grown-ups reference that alleged “confusion,” they were usually laughing too. If you’re African American and thinking about all the angry white people in the country today, you probably appreciate the irony.
Many of the white people who voted for Donald Trump are angry for the same reason Black people have been angry all these years—economic inequality. Angry white men today may not know what it feels like to experience racism, but they certainly know what it feels like to be excluded from the “American Dream.”
The feeling of isolation from the economic prosperity of this land that white working-class Americans have been struggling with since the 1980s is familiar to Black people. We’ve been angry about it for a long time. But now, white people are angry too.
As I write this, the theme from the 1970s sitcom, All in the Family, is on a loop in my brain. The song tells the story of men like the singer, Archie Bunker, an ignorant, bigoted, working-class cab driver in New York City who misses the good old days when people who looked like him “had it made.”
Nostalgia for the way life used to be is what got Donald Trump elected. He promised millions of desperate Americans that if they voted for him, he would help ease their economic suffering. Given how important the working class was to his victory, and how important labor unions have historically been in helping to spread wealth in America, you would think Trump would love unions and the working class. But his actions say otherwise.
Trump seems like the sort of guy who would have voted for Herbert Hoover, the American president during the Great Depression, who did little to comfort Americans at the time, other than to promise, “Prosperity is just around the corner.” When prosperity did finally arrive, it was it because of Franklin Roosevelt.
Largely due to Roosevelt’s policies, the years between 1950 and 1980 were a good time to be a white man in working-class America. Those were the days when he could buy a house in the suburbs and raise his family comfortably on a single income. He didn’t need to go into debt to buy gifts at Christmas, and he could afford to take everyone down to the shore in the summer. Like the song says, “Those were the days!”
Whether he’d admit it or not, the life Archie Bunker was singing about was made possible because of labor unions. As many as a third of American workers were members between 1950 and 1980. Economic gains from collective bargaining during this period helped raise living standards among all workers in America—not just for the people in unions, for everyone. According to economist Paul Krugman, during the four decades after World War II, when union membership was at its height, economic inequality was at its lowest point in our history.
President Trump’s plan to revitalize manufacturing in America could help reverse economic inequality in the U.S., but, for that to happen, the plan would need to include provisions to ensure that American workers share the wealth.
The president’s plan should include something like FDR’s War Labor Board, which helped ensure that workers were paid fairly during the huge industrial buildup to World War II, or Biden’s similar commitment to workers in his climate and infrastructure plans. Without such protections, if Trump’s manufacturing strategy succeeds, it could worsen economic inequality.
Trump’s seeming indifference to the needs of workers is proof of what many of us have been saying about him for years—he doesn’t care about workers. Look at how he treats federal employees.
Early in his first term in office, President Trump issued a trio of executive orders designed to weaken the collective bargaining and workplace protections of federal workers. Then, in 2025, only four months into his second term, he went a step further, signing an order that Joe Davidson of The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive attack on collective bargaining the nation has ever seen.”
President Trump says the tax cuts on tips in his “Big Beautiful Bill” moving through Congress will help working families. But economists say the cuts will have little, if any, impact. All Trump’s talk about cutting taxes on tips just sounds like smoke and mirrors to me—a way to distract attention away from the huge tax cut he’s giving his rich friends and family.
Given Trump’s history of hostility toward the working class, it’s no surprise that he has devoted so little energy to ensuring that his coveted manufacturing boom won’t further exacerbate economic inequality in this country. Such indifference shows that workers are not his priority. Perhaps they never were.
K. Ward Cummings is a former director of intergovernmental affairs for the Maryland secretary of state and a former senior adviser to members of Congress.