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Daily Caller

Union Bigwigs Decline To Endorse Anyone For President Despite Rank-And-File Members Overwhelmingly Backing Trump

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Robert Schmad

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters on Wednesday declined to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election just hours after releasing internal polling data showing that the workers it represents strongly favor former President Donald Trump.

Among rank-and-file members of the major union, 59.6% surveyed said they believe the Teamsters should endorse Trump, compared to just 31% voicing support for Vice President Kamala Harris, a more than 25-point gap that remained more or less unchanged after the union ordered a subsequent survey after the Sept. 10 presidential debate. Despite the poll results, the union refused to make an endorsement as there was “no majority support” for Harris and a lack of “universal support” for Trump, it revealed on Wednesday.

A Teamsters spokesperson did not immediately clarify why the union had different standards for the two candidates. 

“The Teamsters thank all candidates for meeting with members face-to-face during our unprecedented roundtables,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said. “Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business. We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries — and to honor our members’ right to strike — but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The union cited Trump’s refusal to commit to vetoing right-to-work legislation as part of its reasoning for not issuing an endorsement.

The Teamsters, which have historically supported Democrats and often donate to left-of-center causes, made an effort to court Republicans this election cycle. The union made a donation to the Republican National Committee, met with Trump, and O’Brien was even invited to speak at the Republican National Convention. Some on the right have resisted the union’s attempt to ingratiate itself among conservatives, like the Center for Union Facts which put up billboards outside the Republican National Convention calling the Teamsters “two-faced” over its history of liberal spending.

While Republicans were generally open to the Teamsters, the Democratic National Convention snubbed O’Brien by not allowing him to speak at the event, according to The Associated Press.

Harris is considerably less popular among rank-and-file Teamsters than President Joe Biden, who only trailed Trump by about 8 points in a survey ordered by the union prior to his withdrawal from the race. Union leadership met with Harris for a roundtable discussion on Monday, The Hill reported.

“We represent everybody from airline pilots and zookeepers, and we don’t just represent registered Democrats,” O’Brien said to reporters.

The Teamsters’ endorsement could have had a significant impact if it went to either candidate given the concentration of its members in the swing states of Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to Reuters.

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Business

Will Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs End In Disaster Or Prosperity?

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By J.D. Foster

“Liberation Day” has come. So what does it mean? Beats the hell out of me.

What we know is that President Trump’s avalanche of tariffs was to hit a peak on April 2; not end, mind you; not necessarily “the” peak, as more could be on the way; but a peak.

No Trump policy more completely breaks with America’s past than his “beautiful” tariffs on just about everything coming into the United States from just about anywhere.

Will this new policy liberate American manufacturing from foreign shackles? Will it usher in a new era of prosperity, keeping in mind the United States had for many years the consistently best-performing economy in the industrialized world, even overcoming the many inane obstacles erected by the Biden-Harris Administration?

Or will it leave the United States isolated, friendless, and weakened?

The correct answer at this point is no one knows, not even the bloviating talking heads on TV confidently predicting demise or Shangri-la.

Think of it this way. Suppose you’re a restaurant chef and a woman hands you a new recipe. Her father turns 75 soon and they want to have a party at the restaurant. The recipe is for the father’s favorite dish, one her mother made for years.

The recipe looks old, with odd ingredients and processes you’ve not seen before. Now judge it as a chef.

You can’t. Even as you start chopping and dicing, mixing ingredients as instructed, you’re not too sure how this is going to turn out. You have to wait until the dish is on the plate and taste it.

That’s the case with Trump’s tariffs. How will this all turn out? It’s too soon to tell.

The stock market sure doesn’t like it, but why should it? The investor class doesn’t understand this any better than you do. What they do understand is this new policy has upended assumptions and created enormous new uncertainties. We know that dish as those ingredients are always good for a big pullback.

Much of the confusion arises because we don’t know the underlying policy and likely this uncertainty is intentional. Trump likes keeping his counterparts, in this case our trading partners, guessing. If it means Americans are confused for a bit, Trump’s cool with that. Breaking eggs to make an omelette. It will pass and America will be great again afterward. Bon appetite.

If the core policy is to erect massive and mostly permanent tariff walls behind which American firms can hide, then we know how this will turn out: America, meet the dustbin of history.

If the core policy is to force our trading partners to deal with America fairly by reducing their trade barriers after which Trump will remove his tariffs, then this could turn out very well. Tariffs (and non-tariff barriers) in the U.S. and those of our trading partners would fall, reinvigorating the free trade that has energized prosperity for decades.

Which is it? Walls and doom or freedom and prosperity? Again, too early to tell.

Whatever else Trump does in his second term, these tariffs will define his presidency, akin in consequence to Ronald Reagan’s pro-growth tax cuts and Joe Biden’s inflation.

Trump in his second term clearly lives by the saying, “go bold or go home.” He’s got “bold” down pat. We will see over the next year or so whether he and the Republicans go home. Has he liberated Democrats from any fear of Republicans in the mid-terms or in 2028, or he’s liberated America from any fear of Democratic socialism and wokism returning in our lifetimes. The chips are all-in. Soon we will see the cards. Uncertainty, indeed.

JD Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.

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Business

‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

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JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”

“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.

Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.

“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.

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With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.

“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.

“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.

The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.

“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”

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