Trump's legislation record tells the true story of his relationship with the American working class

With Bannon long gone, Trump left surrounded by conservatives keen not to hurt business at expense of appeasing poorer voters, so it's left to rhetoric to create the story rather than tell it

History will record last week as a moment when President Donald Trump turned to raw racial appeals to attack a group of nonwhite lawmakers, but his attacks also underscored a remarkable fact of his first term: his rhetorical appeals to white working-class voters have not been matched by legislative accomplishments aimed at their economic interests.

As Trump was lashing out at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna S. Pressley, House Democrats were passing a minimum wage bill with scant Republican support and little expectation of Senate passage.

On the same day, the president issued a perfunctory announcement naming Eugene Scalia, a corporate lawyer and the son of Antonin Scalia, the former Supreme Court justice, as his new secretary of labour on the recommendation of Sen. Tom Cotton, a hard-line Arkansas conservative.

The events offered a reminder not only of what Trump was interested in — racially driven grabs of media attention — but also of what he was not: governing the way he campaigned in 2016 and co-opting elements of the Democrats’ populist agenda to drive a wedge through their coalition.

Since he became president, Trump has largely operated as a conventional Republican, signing tax cuts that benefit high-end earners and companies, rolling back regulations on corporations and appointing administration officials and judges with deep roots in the conservative movement. His approach has delighted much of the political right.

It has also relieved Democrats. “Just imagine if Trump married his brand of cultural populism to economic populism,” said Rep. Brendan F. Boyle, a Democrat who represents a working-class district in Philadelphia. “He would be doing much better in the polls and be stronger heading into the general election.”

It is a question many Democrats still fret over: What would Trump’s prospects for re-election look like if he pressured Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, into passing bipartisan measures to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, lower the cost of prescription drugs and increase the minimum wage?

Some officials in organised labour say those actions would appeal broadly to their rank-and-file and, in some cases, prompt individual unions to stay on the sidelines of the presidential race.

“If he were to pick and choose some of the House Democrats’ bills and embrace them, it would cross-pressure voters and make it a tougher sell for us that this guy is anti-worker,” said Steve Rosenthal, a longtime strategist in the labour movement.

There is still some hope on Capitol Hill that the president will eventually sign a bipartisan measure being crafted in the Senate that could offer consumers a rebate on prescription drugs that rise above the cost of inflation.

A Democratic bill, passed almost unanimously last week, would repeal a tax on high-cost health insurance plans that was to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. If it passes the Senate, Trump could promote it as a middle-class tax cut, the way Democrats and unions are.

And he will almost certainly take credit for legislation passed Tuesday that would pay the health care costs of emergency workers who rushed to ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001, for the rest of their lives.

Much of America's working class rests on the Rust Belt, a series of once industrial towns sprinkled through the Trump heartlands (AFP/Getty Images)

Within the White House, a small group of staff has begun talking about the need to come up with an agenda for 2021 that could be useful for the re-election; Trump, who has seen the criticism on television that he has no forward-looking message, is also mindful of it, people close to the discussion said.

A White House deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, noted that Democrats were not exactly looking for deals either.

“When the speaker and Sen. Schumer refuse to even negotiate, it destroys any chance of repairing our infrastructure, reducing health care costs, or making lasting reforms to our failed immigration laws,” he said in a statement, referring to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.

He insisted that Democratic leadership is “so beholden to radical ideologies, they would rather fail to deliver for the American people than allow the president to add more accomplishments to his record.”

Democrats, however, have suggested Gidley’s criticism rings hollow, pointing out that Trump walked out of a meeting with Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was focused on infrastructure and that the president has said he would not work with Democrats while he was being investigated by Congress.

But Trump faces internal impediments as well. His impulses are often shaped by news coverage, particularly on Fox News, and the views of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, whose members have no desire to find common cause with Democrats.

The president is also largely detached from the legislative process and has rarely been heard discussing what a second-term agenda could look like or how to tie it to his re-election bid. His few bipartisan accomplishments scarcely get mentioned.

Trump, for example, rarely discusses the criminal justice overhaul that he signed into law after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made it a personal mission and argued to the president that it could help him with African American voters.

This is all to say Trump has shown no sign of aggressively pursuing the sort of working-class-oriented measures that his one-time adviser Steve Bannon predicted would build an enduring Republican majority.

To be sure, the unemployment rate has continued to fall under Trump, reaching a 50-year low. Wage growth has accelerated modestly and is strongest for the lowest-paid workers in the country. Voters give Trump higher approval on the economy than on his overall performance in office.

But most workers are still gaining less under Trump than they did during previous times of low unemployment, such as the late 1990s, and fewer than 2 in 5 respondents to a SurveyMonkey poll for The New York Times this month said their family was better off financially today than a year ago.

With Bannon long gone, Trump is surrounded by conservatives in the White House, such as his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, a former Tea Party congressman who has no appetite for raising the gas tax to pay for an infrastructure bill or to make businesses swallow a minimum-wage increase.

In fact, the prospect of a major public works bill has become a running joke among West Wing aides. When midlevel staffers were working on a plan several months ago, Mulvaney was across the country mocking it during an appearance at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in California in April.

The president’s allies say that his talent is in scorching the opposition, and he is unlikely to deviate much from that task.

“I think he doesn’t mind if it happens, but it’s not his primary focus,” Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, said of racking up policy accomplishments. “His primary focus is to so thoroughly define Democrats as the party of the radical left. I think that matters much more to him than any particular bill.”

- New York Times