Getty Opinion The Party of Workers

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.

In the course of a couple of tweets, Donald Trump may have ended the image of the GOP as the party of corporate America.

After striking a Carrier deal to preserve about 800 jobs from being sent to Mexico, the president-elect slapped the Indiana company Rexnord on Twitter for “rather viciously firing” its workers and then went after Boeing for ripping off the public on a $3 billion Air Force One deal.


Just like that, and in less than 280 characters, Trump had established more distance from Big Business than the GOP had in a generation. In his frenetic way, he is forcing a reorientation of the Republican Party’s economics, a change that is welcome in its broad contours, even if his methods are dubious and the potential pitfalls considerable.

Trump descended his escalator last year into a party that had been known at least since the New Deal as the friend of Wall Street and Big Business.

The GOP reinforced the stereotype in 2012 by nominating a management consultant as its presidential candidate. The Obama reelection campaign picked apart Mitt Romney in the Midwest as a vulture capitalist, and Romney compounded his vulnerability by seeming to express contempt for the 47 percent of people who don’t owe federal income taxes.

Trump has upended the conventions that limited the party’s economic appeal.

Gone is the vaguely Randian emphasis on “makers vs. takers,” with anyone who doesn’t earn enough to make a net contribution to the funding of the federal government considered a parasite on the ship of state.

Gone is the obsession with the federal deficit that has long been the King Charles’ head of Republican policymakers, whose economic program during much of the Obama administration was limited to exhortations to reduce the debt (which, for all its importance, is an abstraction to ordinary Americans).

Gone is the difficulty of conceiving of people as anything other than consumers or budding entrepreneurs who care about the top marginal tax rate and little else.

Contradicting these tropes, Trump bragged about taking even more people off the tax rolls, paid only lip service to the deficit and made workers and their jobs his most prominent theme.

Of course, Republican politicians always talk about jobs and economy, although usually in the bloodless context of gross domestic product growth. Obviously, we want the GDP to grow, but it can be an empty metric for average workers. In fact, it’s possible to pursue policies that increase the GDP — for instance, growing the labor force through higher immigration — while harming the interests of workers.

Trump hammered away at the true bottom line of the economy for most people. Mike Konczal, a fellow with the liberal Roosevelt Institute, went back and listened to Trump stump speeches after the election to better understand how the mogul pulled off his upset. Konczal notes that Trump “never mentions poverty. And while he talks a lot about reducing taxes, he never talks about increasing transfers, redistribution, or access to core goods. He talks about wages, full stop.”

And that’s the key to Trump’s economics. If you squint just right, you can see a strategy. It is to increase growth through traditional Republican means (i.e., tax reform and deregulation) at the same time, he aims to directly create a tighter labor market through soaking up labor via an infrastructure program and reducing foreign competition by discouraging outsourcing and squeezing immigration.

Ultimately, wages grow when productively increases, but a tighter labor market helps. One way to look at trade and immigration policy over the past several decades is that the political class has decided that less-educated Americans should have to compete more with less-educated foreigners, who either work in factories overseas where U.S. concerns relocate, or come here themselves to live and work.

This has to be at least part of the picture of relatively stagnant wages, and declining labor force participation. Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies crunched the numbers for the third quarter of 2016. While overall unemployment has been failing, the labor force participation rate for working-age natives without a bachelor’s degree is still lower than it was before the recession, just 70.4 percent now, compared with 74 percent before the downturn.

The ultimate metric for success for Trump will be whether he can get wages reliably increasing, and pull more of these people back into the workforce.

All that said, there is much about Trump’s approach to criticize. A president of the United States calling out individual companies is inherently arbitrary and subject to abuse. There is a lot of room between being deficit-obsessive and acting as though we don’t have to pay for anything, which is the current Trump program. A blowout $1 trillion infrastructure program would, inevitably, be politicized and wasteful. And protectionism is a dead end.

In all these areas, one hopes Trump will be more restrained — and constrained, particularly by Congress. But the party should accept the new terms Trump has set out for its economic worldview, and focus on workers and their wages more than it has any time in memory.

