Since the beginning of the organized labor movement, the American worker has fought to secure greater prosperity, labor rights, and opportunity. With President Trump, working men and women finally have a true ally in the White House to aid advance their cause.
As we approach the third weekend of the Trump administration’s Labor Day, a holiday set aside to celebrate the achievements of the American labor movement, it’s an ideal time to remember that—above all—the MAGA movement that put Donald Trump in the White House is about delivering the best possible outcomes for American workers. That’s what President Trump built on in 2016: more jobs, better pay, more choice, and truly fair trade deals that put America on a path to lasting prosperity.
In 2016, American workers across this great country trusted Donald Trump and his message, and it carried him to victories in states the Republican candidate hadn’t won in decades. Independent workers and disgruntled Democrats were key to victory in Ohio and other industrial states. This year, workers can look forward to the best Labor Day for working American men and women in a generation, confident that they made the right choice.
In that time, Trump’s leadership has created more than six million recent jobs. Unemployment remains near its lowest level in 50 years—3.7 percent at last report—and wages are growing at the fastest rate in more than a decade. But even those numbers don’t fully capture the economic renaissance of the past two and a half years.
The surge in job growth is the result of a full-blown rebirth of the established American economy — the one that created the middle class we know after World War II.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka apparently noticed this, as he recently implored Democratic presidential candidates to take the interests of union members seriously rather than rely on party affiliation alone to win union votes.
“If you support us, and I mean really support us, we will support you,” Trumka recently declared. “But it would be better if you came with something more than platitudes and party etiquette.”
By Trumka’s criteria, only one candidate in the 2020 presidential race deserves the support of labor unions, and that’s Donald J. Trump.
The American labor movement has been fighting for decades to bring manufacturing back to our shores. Establishment politicians, Republicans and Democrats, have told them time and again that it can’t be done. Those jobs “just aren’t coming back,” as President Barack Obama famously said.
Even more bluntly, Paul Krugman, the court economist of New York’s liberal elite, ridiculed the notion that a President Trump might offer anything more than jobs in the “service sector”—a category that, in the minds of many working-class Americans, typically includes low-wage retail and restaurant jobs with little opportunity for advancement.
All the skeptics were wrong. President Trump has delivered on his promise of a manufacturing renaissance. Manufacturing has added about half a million jobs in his first two years in office, and we’re on track to add another half a million by the end of Trump’s first term.
These jobs — not just in manufacturing, but in energy, construction, technology and more — give the American worker more power, more leverage and more options than at any time since the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s. There’s never been a better time to find a good job, move on to a better one or even change careers.
Unlike Democrats who talk about helping working men and women while promoting policies that hurt American workers, President Trump is sincerely committed to promoting the interests of American labor. Union members played a key role in his victory in 2016, and the Trump campaign is committed to recruiting even more union members to aid reelect the president in 2020. We will devote time, energy, resources, and attention to expanding the coalition of rank-and-file union members who know good work when they see it.
The prosperity that workers enjoy today didn’t come out of nowhere; it came from the president’s pro-growth agenda, including middle-class tax cuts, deregulation, and truly fair trade. But the good times could fade like the last days of summer if we change course now.
Democratic presidential candidates are not only seeking to repeal tax cuts that saved taxpayers an average of $1,400 last year and restore excessive regulations that crippled American businesses during the Obama years, but are also calling for a surrender in the landmark trade negotiations still ongoing between the Trump administration and China.
The president kept his promise to end the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he kept his promise to renegotiate NAFTA and secure a better deal for American workers. He also reached a spectacular trade deal with our ally Japan this weekend. President Trump will do the same with our rival China—unless his Democratic opponents can retake the White House and give Beijing a free hand to resume its abusive, illegal trade practices for another generation.
Democrats have plenty of other nasty surprises in store for working Americans, too. For example, their outrageous “Medicare for All” proposal would eliminate the private health insurance plans that workers hammered out at the bargaining table.
As Democrats seek to take away victories that previous generations of union members have fought so strenuous to achieve, President Trump is keeping his promises to lift up the working men and women of this country. That will make all the difference when it comes time to cast our votes next year.
Bob Paduchik is a senior adviser to the Trump 2020 campaign and former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. He lives in Genoa Township, Delaware County.
