Tag: #maga
President Trump

Why Does Trump Want Lousy, Low-Paid Jobs For His Supporters?

There has almost certainly never been a president who has moved so rapidly to screw the people who put him in office. While Trump lost among more educated voters, he won a solid majority among workers without college degrees and especially white workers without college degrees.

Ordinarily a politician looks to reward their backers. Trump has certainly done plenty to reward his big contributors, and surely will do much more, but he seems to being doing everything possible to harm the moderate and middle-income workers who backed him in large numbers.

This started with things like trying to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which cracks down on banks, credit companies, insurers and others ripping off their customers. We also have the efforts of DOGE to eliminate the IRS's Direct File program, a system that makes it cheap and easy for ordinary workers to file their tax returns. Trump, along with his co-president Elon Musk, are trying to eliminate the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that protects workers’ right to form unions.

Then we have Donald Trump’s plan to whack ordinary people with massive import taxes, which he announced on April 2nd, which he also called “Liberation Day.” Trump’s allies in Congress want to use the money from Trump’s import taxes, together with massive cuts to Medicaid, which also disproportionately benefits moderate-income voters, to offset the lost revenue for big tax cuts to the rich.

But Trump has a truly Trumpian story that he is telling his backers to justify it all. He promised to bring back manufacturing jobs by having more goods produced in America. There are plenty of problems with this plan, as Jared Bernstein and I outlined in a column a few weeks back. It is very unlikely he will be able to regain a large number of manufacturing jobs. Even if we eliminated the trade deficit completely, the share of manufacturing in total employment would just rise from 8.0 percent to 9.0 percent.

But the story gets even worse. If we go back 50 years, manufacturing were good jobs, offering higher pay and benefits than most other jobs in the economy. This was especially true for workers without college degrees, who often could support a family and put kids through college on the wages they earned in manufacturing jobs. (This is mostly a story about men, as readers likely recognize.)

But the reason manufacturing jobs were good jobs half a century ago is that they were disproportionately union jobs. Roughly a third of manufacturing workers were in unions, compared to just 15 percent for the rest of the private sector. This is no longer the case. At present, only 8.0 percent of manufacturing workers are in unions, only slightly higher than the 6.0 percent for the rest of the private labor force. As a result, manufacturing jobs are no longer especially good jobs.

If we just look at production and non-supervisory workers, a category that covers 80 percent of the workforce, but excludes supervisors and high-end professional workers, the average hourly wage for workers in manufacturing in 2024 was $27.78 an hour. That is almost 8.0 percent less than the $30.13 average for all production and non-supervisory workers. This is not a full comparison. We would have to consider benefits, as well as controlling for factors like education, location, and gender to do a full comparison. But it is unlikely that even with full controls we would find that manufacturing jobs paid a substantial premium compared to other jobs in the economy.

The graph below compares the hourly wage for production and supervisory workers in manufacturing with the average hourly wage in other industries.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

As can be seen the pay in manufacturing is substantially lower than in several other major industries. Pay in trucking averages $29.77 an hour, more than 7.0 percent higher than the wage for manufacturing workers. FWIW, more trade likely means more workers employed in trucking. The pay for workers in utilities averages $45.37, more than 63 percent above the average pay in manufacturing.

The average pay for workers in banks averages $30.24, almost 9.0 percent above the pay in manufacturing. Note that we are excluding bank managers and professionals from this calculation, so these highly paid workers are not distorting the calculation. The average pay for workers in healthcare was $34.69 an hour, almost 25 percent higher than the average for manufacturing workers. It’s true that many of these workers have college degrees or at least some education beyond high school, but that will also be true for many workers in manufacturing who have done an apprenticeship or gone to a community college or trade school.

There are some industries where workers clearly do worse than manufacturing. The average pay in retail is just $20.94 an hour, almost 25 percent less than the pay in manufacturing. In hotels and restaurants, the average is just $19.54 an hour, almost 30 percent less than in manufacturing. Manufacturing workers are clearly doing better than workers in these industries, but manufacturing no longer stands out as an especially high-paying sector.

If the Trump deal is that moderate and middle-income workers will pay much higher taxes due to his tariffs, but will be somewhat more likely to get manufacturing jobs as a result of his “reindustrialization” strategy, it does not look like a very good one.

Dean Baker is an economist, author, and co-founder of the Center for Economic Policy and Research. His writing has appeared in many major publications, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack Dean Baker.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Peter Navarro

MAGA Media Blame Advisers For Trump Tariff Nightmare

Numerous right-wing media figures are placing blame for the chaos and confusion over Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs on two of his top economic appointees — senior trade adviser Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — rather than on Trump himself.

When announced, Donald Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs amounted to one of the largest tax hikes in American history, and despite being labeled “reciprocal,” they had absolutely nothing to do with foreign tariff rates. These new rates, the highest in more than 100 years, caused widespread market volatility and are projected to raise costs for the average American family by thousands of dollars while also increasing the risks of a recession — if they go into effect.

A week after announcing the various tariff rates on dozens of countries, Trump announced a 90-day “pause” — after his press secretary previously called reports of such a pause “fake news” — aside from a universal 10% rate on every country except China, which now has a 145% tariff rate. The Trump administration then amended the tariff rate for Chinese-exported consumer electronics to 20%. This followed comments from Lutnick about a different tariff for electronics, specifically a sectoral tariff on semiconductors.

Pro-Trump media figures on Fox and elsewhere have been blaming Lutnick and Navarro for tariff-related confusion over the past week:

  • Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich: “Some confusion was spurred from the mixed messaging” from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Heinrich aired a clip of Lutnick saying on ABC’s This Week that consumer electronics will be “exempt from the reciprocal tariffs” but will soon receive their own sectoral tariff. Earlier in the segment, Heinrich reported that Trump “said they are still subject to that 20% charge he imposed over fentanyl.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/14/25]
  • Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo blamed confusion on Lutnick and Navarro saying different things on different news programs. In an interview with Trump National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, Bartiromo said: “You had some of your colleagues out — Howard Lutnick was on one show, Peter Navarro was on the other show — and, you know, with some of them saying, well, there are no exemptions. And then somebody else saying, well, they’re going to be in a different bucket. It created some confusion.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria, 4/14/25]
  • Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone: “I'm so glad he made that clarification on Air Force One. That's why it’s so good to have the president himself come out, because they’ve had some messaging missteps — not him, people underneath him.” Host Maria Bartiromo agreed with a guest who said, “I think this back-and-forth, this confusion that I feel after reading about this all weekend long is definitely part of the strategy in keeping the other side guessing what’s going on.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria, 4/14/25]
  • Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon: “Let me be blunt. Lutnick, who was Elon’s pick for secretary treasury, I think he’s close to being an unmitigated disaster. We should see a lot less of Lutnick on TV.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 4/14/25]
  • Fox Business host Charles Payne: “Mixed and confusing messaging” from Navarro and Lutnick “has the same gut-wrenching impact as an unnecessary holding penalty that negates a touchdown.” Payne also wrote: “Some people said I was too hard on my old friend Peter Navarro on Wednesday, but I was hard on messaging from him and Lutnick.” [Twitter/X, 4/13/25]
  • Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino quoted an anonymous “senior Wall Street executive w ties to the Trump White House,” saying: “Susie (Wiles) needs to get control of Lutnick. He is a wrecking ball.” Gasparino added that his source “described @howardlutnick’s comments about the temporary nature of the tariff exemptions as ‘off message.’” Gasparino’s quote continued: “Now the market will open way down again since it appears the administration is totally confused.” [Twitter/X, 4/13/25]
  • The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “If you wanna see a real bull market, the president should fire Peter Navarro today.” Shapiro added: “It would be stupid to continue running full speed into a wall in the name of Peter Navarro's benighted idiocy with regard to trade.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 4/10/25]
  • Shapiro: Navarro “should be nowhere near trade policy.” Shapiro also said: “Peter Navarro, who is the architect of much of this trade policy, a man who used to be a zero-growther, actually, in his early career, and then called himself Ron Vara in his own writings to create a fake name under which to attribute many of his writings. It was like Voldemort. His last name is Navarro. Get it? Ron Vara? Get it? You don't? It's dumb.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 4/9/25]
  • MAGA personality Ian Miles Cheong: “Navarro is out. He f’d everything up.” In an earlier post, Cheong wrote: “Navarro needs to go. Thank God Bessent was there.” [Twitter/X, 4/10/25, 4/9/25]
  • Trump operative Roger Stone: “The economy? More Bessent, less Lutnick.” [Twitter/X, 4/9/25]
  • Washington Examiner senior writer David Harsanyi: “Navarro is the Fauci of finance. I hope he's done.” [Twitter/X, 4/9/25]
  • Fox Business host Dagen McDowell ridiculed Navarro for “his reciprocal trade-girl math that's kneecapping the United States.” McDowell added: “The quicker that they get him off of TV and away from numbers, the better.” Co-host Jackie DeAngelis agreed, adding: “I actually think they realize that. I think they realize Bessent should be the point person on this, and they're putting him out there. I think they're gonna pull back on Lutnick, I think they're gonna pull back on Navarro a little bit too. They need to get clear on their messaging and make sure there's no nuance in there.” [Fox Business, The Bottom Line, 4/7/25]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

I Dream of Greenland

Why Greenland Became The Ultimate Fascist Dreamscape

Ever since Don Jr. and his “Trump Force One” team of bobblehead doll righties landed at Nuuk Airport a day after the fourth anniversary of January 6, we’ve all been scratching our heads. It’s hard for normies like us to comprehend the deranged, anachronistic white supremacist lunacy behind the Greenland fantasy. Yes, there’s the newly melted Arctic and its soon-to-be-contested waterways, yes, there are rare earth minerals, and yes, it’s sparsely inhabited by indigenous people that Trump and MAGA seem to regard as lower races.

But going to the mat for it, with Trump browbeating and insulting the prime minister of Denmark? JD Vance flying over uninvited with his wife by his side? During my process of researching a long article for New York magazine about Donald Trump Jr., it became clear that the Greenland play is, on one level, a giant dog whistle to the white fascist extremist base.

Greenland has been – for decades – a neo-Nazi fantasy. Julius Evola, a mid-20th-century Italian philosopher and now “the internet’s favorite fascist,” proposed Greenland as “the primordial homeland of a highly civilized prehistoric white race … sufficiently civilized to be conceived as ‘divine’ by the ancients.” (Evola’s explanation for how these divines could morph into actual non-white indigenous inhabitants is that their divinity was perhaps diluted by, you guessed it, breeding with lower orders.)

The online intellectual fascist influencers followed and amplified by Vance, Junior, Musk, Marc Andreessen, and countless Trump administration minions (who we have covered in previous Freakshows) are deeply attached to this mythology.

An anon called Plethonist (who seems to have now deleted his X account after we started writing about fascist Xitter) writes in an online white supremacist-friendly rag called IM1776. The magazine is published by The Arts & Literature Foundation, an outfit that bills itself as the “leading publication of the New Right.” It is housed in the same building near Capitol Hill as other hard-right, well-funded conservative outfits, including the Conservative Partnership Institute and the extreme Zionist Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and ironically, was home to far-right Liberty Lobby (founded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto). Its editor-at-large writes and tweets under the pseudonym Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Here is Plethonist in IM1776 waxing hysterically Rudyard Kipling about Greenland, a month before Trump started to publicly lay claim to it:

“Projects call us now. Recently, some have spoken of plans to purchase Greenland, either for the United States or for the creation of a new state entirely. In either case, this would mean the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain. A hard people then, and rich perhaps, from the resources they could exploit there, or through the domination of advanced technology in a land free from pinching regulation and a parasitic governing class. It is no longer so hard to believe that this will happen, after what we’ve seen. I hope it does, and I would like to offer one thing to the men who, now or in the future, make that island noisy with ambition and industry: Palingenesis.” (Palingenesis is an ultranationalist concept of racist rebirth.)

Don Jr.’s pal Jack “Jack P” Posobiec wasn’t on the trip to Greenland, but he was definitely in on the joke. Two days before Christmas and more than two weeks before Junior and his posse landed in Nuuk, he posted on Xitter a long letter to Greenlanders which reads in part:

“Dear Honored Residents of Greenland, Imagine a Greenland where the promise of your land's vast potential is not just a dream but a reality. A Greenland where your children can dream bigger, your economy can grow stronger, and your voice can resonate louder on the world stage. This vision can become your reality by joining the United States of America.”

Posobiec (who has called Democrats and progressives “unhumans” and named dictators as political role models) has been grifting off Trumpism since 2016. The longtime neo-Nazi collaborator is so highly regarded among Trump cabinet members that Treasury Secretary Bessent invited him to Ukraine. Hegseth reportedly wanted to bring him to Europe (but Posobiec, clearly a man in demand, declined the latter invitation).

On Xitter, extreme right Passage Press publisher Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman amused himself after Junior’s visit by proposing that sacked DEI federal employees could be sent to Greenland to mine rare earth minerals. (America’s Siberia, for now, appears to be ICE’s swamp gulag in Louisiana.).

Another Greenland dreamer is Dryden Brown, a Peter Thiel acolyte, who designs for building utopian cities for the tech elites in a project called Praxis and who was covered rather fawningly not long ago in the New York Times.

Brown was moved to advertise his own white nation fantasies the same day Junior landed in Greenland, in a giddy tweet that included a map (see below) of a new American empire encompassing all the white-led nations on the planet.

For a while after Junior’s expeditionary assault, MAGA tried to claim Greenlanders really want America to invade (which is a lie). Of course, what Greenlanders might actually want is of no real concern to men seeking a new homeland from which to “re-breed” Aryans.

In his Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth, Yale historian Greg Grandin proposed that Trumpism, and the big beautiful border wall of the first MAGA regime specifically, signaled the end of the nation’s founding ethos. He proposed that only endless expansion had kept the violence at the heart of the American experiment at bay. Now, with the oil wars lost and the nation too broke to conquer farther frontiers, we were shut in together, with no steam valve for the hate.

A white nationalist beachhead in Greenland buys more time for us, perhaps.

The fantasy is one-half X-Box sword-wielding hero homunculus and one-half emulation of Hitler – the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. The bros read their Tolkien. Their thumbs were weaned on the controllers moving heroic medieval knights and sorcerers. For the Millennial fascists in Junior’s set, Greenland promises manly ardors and challenges where a new race might emerge from the chrysalis of the 21st-century American Everyman, waddling between SUV and front door with a Diet Coke in hand.

Donald Trump might be a vulgar marketer of money-laundering condos and cheesy merch – but when they squint, he’s the vessel by which the white philosopher-priests that inhabited Hyperborea might return.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER'S American Freakshow.


 Laura Loomer

'Real Power': Trumpist Kook Laura Loomer Lights A Five-Alarm Fire

President Donald Trump’s abrupt apparent removal of the general who oversaw U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at the reported behest of the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a notorious bigot and conspiracy theorist, is a five-alarm fire for national security and good governance. The move demonstrates that the only qualification for service in the administration is personal loyalty to the president as determined by his most zealous sycophants.

Top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees said on Thursday night that Gen. Timothy D. Haugh had been removed from his positions as director of the NSA and head of the military’s Cyber Command. According to The New York Times, “a U.S. official briefed on the matter said Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and outside adviser to President Trump, called for General Haugh’s removal during her Oval Office meeting on Thursday. Mr. Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to fire General Haugh, the official said.”

Loomer subsequently appeared to take credit, writing on X that Haugh and his deputy had been “fired” because they were “disloyal to President Trump” and thanking the president “for being receptive to the vetting materials provided to you.” She gave no evidence of Haugh’s purported disloyalty in her post — nor any critique of his service in his positions — instead criticizing him as “a Biden appointee” who “had no place serving in the Trump admin given the fact that he was HAND PICKED by” former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.

Haugh is not the only apparent casualty of Loomer’s efforts. His seeming removal comes amid a firestorm caused by the revelation that Hegseth had provided precise details about an imminent U.S. military strike in Yemen in a Signal messaging group of top Trump officials assembled by national security adviser Mike Waltz, a move experts said endangered the lives of U.S. service members.

Waltz and Hegseth still remain in their posts — but as that story continued to metastasize, Loomer met with Trump in the Oval Office and provided him “with opposition research on [National Security Council] staffers whom she views as neoconservatives or not sufficiently loyal to the president.” The White House purged at least six NSC staffers following that meeting.

Trump surrounds himself with and takes counsel from a litany of right-wing media figures because he appreciates their fervent public support, particularly though not exclusively on Fox News. Those individuals wield immense power over every aspect of governance despite their total lack of relevant qualifications or temperament.

Even among the MAGA movement’s constellation of grifters, con artists, bigots, and loons, Loomer shines brightly. Here’s what I wrote about her in September as her presence accompanying Trump on the campaign trail triggered concern even from some of his other close allies:

Loomer is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who is “pro-white nationalism.” She has claimed there is a “genocide” of “native white populations,” which she says are “being replaced in this country by third-world invaders,” and accused “so many rich Jews” of having “a fixation on trying to destroy America.” She has accused the Biden administration of seeking to assassinate Trump; called for the execution of unnamed “Democrats who are guilty of treason”; said that “all of these communist secretaries of state who try to rig our elections” against Trump “belong in jail for election interference”; and shared a video which claimed “9/11 was an Inside Job!”
...
Loomer has in recent weeks described [then-Vice President Kamala] Harris, whose parents immigrated from India and Jamaica, as “a brain-dead bimbo who sucked so much c**k in order to get to the political position that she's in today,” said she “is NOT black and never has been,” said her election would ensure that “Ebonics will replace English as the language of our land,” and said that if she’s elected “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.”

Loomer is nonetheless unusually influential because Trump apparently appreciates her personal, fanatical loyalty. “I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer told The Washington Post last year. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”

She apparently has something now — enough influence to impose her own loyalty tests on high-ranking government officials and see them cashiered by the president (and, she claims, to help shape his foreign policy). And so the country turns on the whims of someone once described by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), herself no stranger to bigoted and unhinged conspiracy theories, as “mentally unstable and a documented liar” who “can not be trusted” and is “toxic and poisonous.”

If you had said in October that if Trump were elected he would end up firing the NSA director and purging the NSC on the advice of someone like Loomer, you’d have been accused of having a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And yet here we are, careening up to worst-case scenarios before the president’s 100-day mark.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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