Laurie Chavez-DeRemmer is as good a choice for Secretary of Labor as could reasonably be hoped for. It’s also, unfortunately, smart policy for Trump.
Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) attends a signing ceremony at the U.S. Capitol for a resolution repealing the District of Columbia Penal Code Revised Act of 2022, March 10, 2023.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
For three weeks, I’ve been tearing my hair out as Trump has nominated one ill-qualified and/or angry candidate after another. But one of the nominations stands out for its relative reasonableness: Laurie Chavez-DeRemerformer Republican representative from Oregon and daughter of a Teamsters member, for Secretary of Labor.
Chavez-DeRemer, who narrowly lost re-election in a district where she is seen as pro-union, is one of the few outgoing Republican members of Congress who supported labor over big business and positioned itself as a supporter of the union. She was in her election campaign supported by more unions than her Democratic opponent Janelle Bynum. Given these positions, her nomination to a cabinet filled with anti-labor billionaires who mostly support the cartoonishly regressive policy stance of Project 2025 is an odd choice.
Trade unions praised the nominationwith particularly strong words of support from the Teamsters, whose leadership was on good terms with Trump in the run-up to the election. AFL-CIO published a statement promoting the nominee’s record. There are staunch progressives in Congress like Senator Elizabeth Warren also expressed support.
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Meanwhile, conservatives have raised eyebrows at the prospect of a GOP labor secretary who doesn’t take kindly to right-to-work laws; supported the PRO Act, which was designed to facilitate union organizing efforts; and appears to be in favor of raising the minimum wage. National reviewThe editors argued that the nomination “makes no sense.” The Washington Examiner made a choice. Right inclined Coalition for a Democratic Workplace expressed her anxiety. I several senators from the Republican Party suggested that she may have an uphill battle for confirmation.
What is happening here? Why would a man like Trump, who has amassed a fortune partly at the expense of hard workers; who boasts of contractors; whose previous administration, with the strong support of three labor secretaries, eliminated overtime protections for workers; and who talked to Elon Musk about firing the striking employees — nominating a pro-unionist as his labor minister?
The answer lies in the numbers. Last November, Trump received somewhere around 45 percent votes of people living in joint families. good more than 50 percent Trump voters included workers or white-collar workers; for Harris, the equivalent figure was just over 40 percent. Moreover, in heavily unionized West Coast cities, Democratic turnout fell. For example, in Multnomah County in the state of Oregon, which consists of Portland and the surrounding area, the number of votes from Democrats fell by almost 16 percent.
Such depressed Democratic turnout was also true in suburban areas around Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. And while that didn’t stop Harris from easily winning the Electoral College votes of California, Oregon and Washington, it offered a glimpse of a possible future in which Democratic control of those three states is no longer as assured as it has been in recent decades.
Domestically, it also happened in the union strongholds of Las Vegas and Phoenix, both of which had lower Democratic turnouts in 2024 than in 2020, both of which hurt Harris’ chances in Nevada and Arizona.
All this gives Trump an incredible opening that speaks to the scope of his ambitions to reshape the American political landscape not only for four years, but also for the next election cycles.
Trump is certainly not a true supporter of labor and unions. To suggest otherwise is to willfully ignore his dismal record on labor policy and his penchant for surrounding himself with apostles of corporate greed. But despite these realities, he has successfully created an image of himself as a benefactor and defender of blue-collar America’s values, leaving the door open to a future in which Trump could create a Juan Peron-style strongman regime backed by a few loyalists. by unions (top of the list, the Teamsters) and their leadership.
That makes the Chavez-DeRemer nomination a smart policy. That offers an opportunity to destroy the Democratic base in super-blue, union-heavy West Coast states, as well as the swing states of Nevada and Arizona. And it provides Light political sop to Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who spoke at the GOP convention this summer, dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and who reportedly lobbied Chavez-DeRemer to become the next Labor secretary in the weeks after the election.
It’s also relatively low-hanging fruit that allows Trump to appear pro-worker without changing his policy agenda toward unions. Like recently Dan La Boltz wrote in Counterattackhaving a Labor Secretary who is mildly pro-labor does not neutralize the damage done by having a staunchly anti-union National Labor Relations Board and numerous appointees who support Project 2025’s efforts to eliminate overtime pay, workplace safety standards, and access to benefits such as health and nutrition programs.
Chavez-DeRemer is a surprise choice, and her nomination is perhaps a ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak political landscape. But it would be foolish to puzzle over what this nomination means. Trump hasn’t had a come-to-Jesus moment on work issues. Rather, he and his team, opportunists to the core, concluded that playing nice with the Teamsters and promoting their chosen candidate to be the next Secretary of Labor might be a good thing.
