Why do so many employees love Trump?

Following Teamster leader Sean O’Brien’s comments at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, liberal commentators were baffled by the idea that a union leader would endorse Donald Trump’s popularity among American workers.

Writing in the Atlantic OceanFor example, David Graham describes Trump’s appeals to the working class as the “fake populism you’ve ever seen,” while Rolling Stone summed up the July RNC as an attempt to “appease the working class with empty, populist rhetoric.”

At some level, there is some obvious truth to these assessments. While Trump can point to a few examples of how he helped save jobs and put American workers forward as president — such as his partial success in saving jobs at an Indiana Carrier plant and his renegotiation of NAFTA to include stronger labor protections — his record on labor generally does little to inspire confidence.

To take just a few examples, Trump packed the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union corporate lawyers and failed to deliver on a promise to bring vital manufacturing jobs back to Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. He threatened to veto the union-friendly PRO Act (which, incidentally, none of the MAGA Republicans in the Senate, including J.D. Vance, voted for) and pushed through regressive tax cuts that massively benefited the wealthy while delivering no broader economic benefits to ordinary Americans.

Although Trump raised import tariffs with the aim of reducing jobs in American manufacturing, there is no evidence that this policy has had a positive effect on American jobs.

Given Trump’s less-than-stellar track record on jobs, is his strong support among working-class voters (especially, but certainly not exclusively, white workers) simply a reflection of his shrewd ability to lure those voters out of their own economic self-interest by doubling down on their worst xenophobic, sexist, and racist tendencies? Many liberal commentators are adamant that the answer is yes. Writing in Vote Shortly after Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, German Lopez boldly claimed that “Trump won because of racial resentment,” while NPR’s Rich Barlow argued that “racial resentment, not the economy, made Trump president.”

While there is little doubt that cynical, fear-based appeals to the worst impulses of white working-class people are a key part of the story, when we look at the content of Trump’s appeals to working-class voters, we see that a narrow focus on the darkest aspects of Trump’s rhetoric obscures consistent and often quite powerful appeals that directly tap into decades of economic dislocation experienced by millions of American workers.

My analysis of Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches and statements shows that, however dishonestly his messages were delivered, he spoke deeply about fundamental issues that are close to the hearts of many working-class Americans and that have been ignored for decades by both Democratic and Republican politicians.

Let’s start with a 30,000-foot look at Trump’s rhetoric during the 2016 campaign. To get a baseline sense of how much Trump focused on different types of rhetorical appeals during the 2016 campaign, I collected all available Trump campaign statements and speeches from 2015 through Election Day on November 8, 2016. I then identified the number of times Trump mentioned key words and phrases to capture different policy bundles and rhetorical styles.

Contrary to popular belief, it was jobs and trade — not immigration or some other divisive social or cultural issue — that dominated Trump’s 2016 rhetoric. Trump mentioned jobs and trade (“jobs,” “manufacturing,” “unfair trade deals,” etc.) an average of 10.3 times per statement or speech, compared to the 8.3 times he mentioned immigration (a 21 percent decrease in average mentions) and the less than one time per statement or speech that he mentioned controversial social issues (excluding immigration), from abortion to trans rights to Black Lives Matter. Indeed, Trump used pro-labor rhetoric almost three times as often — and anti-economic elite rhetoric more than twice as often — while raising controversial social issues.

There were certainly speeches in which candidate Trump focused more on immigration than anything else, and as one might expect, these speeches were filled with hateful anti-immigrant vitriol. Among many other blatant lies, he lied about immigrants and their children convicted of terrorist activities in the United States; he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton wanted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars resettling Middle Eastern refugees in American cities; and he falsely claimed that Clinton would implement an “open borders” immigration policy.

But even in these speeches, Trump spent as much time connecting immigration to the economic well-being of American workers as he did demonizing undocumented workers themselves, as in a June 2016 speech when he claimed that “Hillary’s Wall Street immigration agenda will keep immigrant communities of poor and unemployed Americans unemployed. She can’t claim to care about African-American and Hispanic workers when she wants to bring in millions of new low-wage workers to compete with them.” Regardless of whether Trump’s controversial claims were empirically true or false, the point is that his comments framed immigration in terms of protecting American workers, not in overtly intolerant terms based on condemning an entire class of people.

Trump’s speech on jobs and trade focused on three main themes: massive job losses due to bad trade policies, the increasing hardship on American workers, and blaming the elite for doing nothing to stop the decline of the working class.

First, Trump frequently cited the harm that free trade policies have done to American workers. In a series of speeches in the month leading up to Election Day in 2016, Trump repeatedly argued that “we are living through the greatest job loss in the history of the world.” In an Oct. 16 speech in New Hampshire, for example, he explained that “the state of New Hampshire has lost almost one in three manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. . . . Since China joined the World Trade Organization . . . 70,000 factories have closed or left the United States. That’s an average of fifteen factories closing every day. . . . If I win on day one, we will announce our plans to renegotiate NAFTA. If we don’t get the deal we want, we will leave NAFTA and start over to get a much better deal.” These comments could easily have come from Bernie Sanders or AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, and they are consistent with legitimate research on the negative impact of trade policies on American manufacturing jobs in the 1990s and 2000s.

Trump then focused his remarks repeatedly on how it has become harder for working Americans to keep their heads above water economically than in the past. In a speech on October 18, 2016 in Colorado, he again sounded indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders, admonishing that “many workers today make less money than they did 18 years ago, they work harder and longer, but they make less money. Some of them work two, three jobs, and they still take home less money.” This again reflects the real-world experiences of millions of American workers since the 1970s, who have seen their wages stagnate or decline, their share of American wealth plummet, and their chances of achieving a higher standard of living than their parents plummet.

After identifying and addressing the economic problems facing working Americans, Trump consistently placed the blame for “a wave of globalization that is wiping out our middle class and our jobs” squarely on big business and “Washington elites”:

The political establishment has destroyed our factories and our jobs. . . . Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan — and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and across the country. They have stripped these cities bare and plundered the wealth for themselves and taken their jobs.

Finally, Trump not only invoked classic economic populist messages to call out elites for their role in crushing the American dream for so many, but he also invoked the inherent dignity of working Americans and stressed that they needed a greater voice in Washington. In a speech in Michigan in August, for example, he told listeners that his campaign was going to be “a victory for the people, a victory for the wage earner, the blue-collar worker. Remember this, a great, great victory for the blue-collar worker. They haven’t had those victories in a very, very long time. A victory for every citizen and for all the people whose voices haven’t been heard in a very, very long time. They’re going to be heard again.”

And while it may sound absurd in theory, given his background in the super-elite class, Trump personally identified with the working class, as evidenced in a speech in Eerie, Pennsylvania, on August 12:

I grew up, you know, they say, “You know you’re really rich. How come you relate to these (working class) people?” Well, my father built houses, and I worked in those houses and I got to know the electricians. I got to know all those people. I got to know the plumbers, the steam fitters — I got to know them all. And I liked them better than the rich people that I know.

A month later he repeated this theme in Asheville, North Carolina:

While my opponent paints you as deplorable and incorrigible, I call you hardworking American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people. You are mothers and fathers, soldiers and sailors, carpenters and welders.

Taken together, these appeals make it pretty clear why so many disaffected working- and middle-class voters—who have either experienced these economic crises firsthand or, in the case of many relatively affluent Trump voters, seen it all unfold in their communities—would find Trump appealing. Unlike virtually every politician they’d ever heard before, Trump not only spoke over and over again about the economic pain felt by so many working-class Americans, but he also named the elite culprits by name, something that traditional politicians tend to shy away from doing.

Nearly a decade later, progressives are again ignoring the economic underpinnings of Trump’s working-class support at their peril. Yes, of course it’s too late to reach most Trump voters, whose loyalty to the former president has become a core feature of their identity. And yes, of course, outrageous appeals designed to activate latent racial and xenophobic tendencies were a key tool in Trump’s electoral playbook.

But many former and likely future Trump voters saw something unique in his brash economic populist message, and rewarded him for it. Progressives can and should compete for these voters by making the same kinds of economic appeals. But in sharp contrast to President Trump, they must back up that rhetoric by implementing policies that will actually help workers, not the 1 percent.

It’s been eight years since Trump first won the presidency. If progressives want to keep him out of power, they need to take his working-class appeal seriously — right now — before it’s too late.