Trump says he's obsessed with the plight of workers — but his actions say otherwise: analysis

Political correspondent Robert Tait reports President Donald Trump’s “pro-worker” claims are running up against his actual behavior 10 months into his second term.

“Unpaid forced leave and mass firings are hardly the first things to spring to mind as hallmarks of a golden age of the American worker. Yet these were the possibilities floated by Donald Trump this week as he addressed a government shutdown … in a dispute over funding priorities.”

As reports emerge of a White House memorandum proposing furloughed federal workers not receive back pay, Trump “was quick to twist the knife,” said Tait, despite posing “as the champion of American workers” during his campaign.

“I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” Trump told reporters, speaking of American workers impacted by furloughs and firings. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

That quote tells “the true story of the US worker’s plight under Trump 2.0,” reports Tait, citing analysts who say Trump has enacted policies that have worsened the economic realities of the working person while parading “blue-collar solidarity” rhetoric.

“His tax-and-spending provisions in Trump’s flagship ‘big beautiful bill’, tariffs and the administration’s agenda of mass deportation of undocumented people are all taking a toll on workers’ living conditions, by raising costs and driving down wages,” said Tait.

Economic Policy Institute government affairs Director Samantha Sanders said Trump’s April appearance at the White House in the company of coal miners and a giant banner of Trump’s face handing from the Department of Labor building in Washington DC means nothing in the face of his policies.

“When it comes down to actual actions, we know, from his personal life to his policy life, he just does not deliver on those things,” said Sanders.

Trump’s big talk of “bringing back manufacturing,” is hard to accept when “tens of thousands of jobs have gone from manufacturing in the past couple of months and a lot of it is because of increased costs from tariffs,” said Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “When businesses make adjustments to maintain their margin, labor is always the first to go.”

And while manufacturing workers took a hit, Ajilore pointed out that Trump granted a tariff exemption to Apple, who produces many of its computer products in China and other Asian countries.

And under Trump, the 2025 labor market has frozen with very little hiring.

“The long-term unemployment, people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, has gone up from 20 percent to 25 percent of the jobless,” Ajilore added. “And a larger share of them are college graduates, who would normally be able to get jobs. So workers aren’t able to experience mobility or progress — and at the same time, costs are going up.”

Read the Guardian report at this link.