Does Trump hate the working class?

When I was growing up in the eighties, I would often hear the adults around me talking about how all the white people they knew seemed confused about why Black people were always so angry. I laugh about it now, not just because it’s funny.  But also because, whenever I heard a grownup reference that alleged “confusion,” they were usually laughing about it too.  If you are Black like me, 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 so many 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.”   

Black people have been in the U.S. since before there was a U.S.  We helped clear the land, cut the roads and name everything.  Yet, we were forced to sit on the sidelines for centuries as everyone else got to enjoy the fruits of our labor. 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’re 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.  That song tells the story of what it was like to be a white working man in America when economic inequality was at its lowest point. 

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played,  the tune begins.  

Songs that made the Hit Parade, 

Guys like us, we had it made, 

Those were the days! 

Donald Trump rode a wave of working class anger into the White House.  Seeing his chance to avoid prison, he promised millions of desperate Americans that if they voted for him, he would shower them with gold.  Given how important the working class was to his victory, and how important labor unions have been in helping spread wealth in America, you would think Trump would love unions and the working class. But, he clearly doesn’t.    

I don’t need an economist to tell me that working families are not a priority for President Trump.  Or that the real strategy behind his pursuit of tariffs is to create the illusion of a revenue stream so that he can justify making permanent his expiring tax cuts for the rich. I know Trump doesn’t care that tariffs will raise prices on the working class, or that pursuing a manufacturing boom in America, without also building pathways for workers to share the wealth, might worsen economic inequality in this country.  I know Trump doesn’t care about economic inequality.  And, he certainly doesn’t care about working men and women—even the white ones.  

And you knew who you were then,  

Girls were girls and men were men,  

Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again. 

Based on his actions while president, Trump is the sort of guy who would have voted for President Hoover if he had had a chance.  As the working class suffered through the Great Depression, Hoover did nothing more than tell them prosperity was around the corner.   When prosperity did finally arrive, it was in the hands of Franklin Roosevelt. 

Largely because of Roosevelt, the years between 1950 and 1980 were a great time 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 have to go into debt to buy gifts at Christmas, and he could afford to take everyone down to the beach in the summer. 

Didn’t need no welfare state, 

Everybody pulled his weight, 

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.

Those were the days!

Whether he’d admit it or not, the life the man in this song lived was made possible because of labor unions.  As many as a third of American workers were members between 1950 and 1980.  Collective bargaining during this period helped raise living standards among all workers in America—not just for the people in unions, for everyone.  Indeed, 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.   

That all started to change in 1980 when President Reagan started the trend of cutting taxes for the rich.  It was also Reagan who helped spurred the decline of unions when he fired air traffic controllers in 1981 for striking.  His hardball tactics made it socially acceptable for American companies to do the same.  Many point today to Reagan’s actions as a key reason union membership is so low today.  But, it wasn’t all Reagan’s fault. 

By the late 1990s, NAFTA, globalization, and America’s transition to a service economy had changed the relationship between workers and companies.  As union membership declined, and economic inequality grew, corporate tax cuts, and the low cost of foreign labor, boosted corporate profits.  Under no obligation to share those profits with American workers, company executives gave themselves huge pay raises.  As their salaries grew, the salaries of workers remained flat.  They have been flat ever since. 

President Trump enters this charged reality with an insistence that manufacturing is the answer to all of America’s economic problems.  But, what is conspicuously missing from his plan is a pathway for American workers to share the wealth—something like what Roosevelt did in 1942 when he created the War Labor Board to monitor worker salaries during the huge buildup for war, or when President Biden paired his massive infrastructure plan with strong commitments to worker rights and collective bargaining.  No similar efforts appear to be a part of Trump’s thinking.  But, for anyone paying attention, that is no surprise.   

Early in his first term in office, President Trump issued a trio of executive orders designed to weakened the collective bargaining and workplace protections of federal workers.  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.”  Trump has a history of hostility toward workers.  So, it’s no surprise that he has devoted so little energy to ensuring that his manufacturing plan doesn’t exacerbate economic inequality.  Such indifference suggests workers are not his real priority. 

Maybe they never were.