Image by Bao Menglong.

Although President Donald Trump has claimed that “every policy” of his administration was “designed to lift up the American worker,” he has acted consistently, since returning to office in January 2025, to undermine workers’ chosen representatives, America’s labor unions.

The most flagrant Trump action along these lines occurred in March 2025, when he issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than one million federal government employees. This measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for 1 out of 14 unionized workers in the United States.

Trump’s anti-union campaign dovetailed with his efforts to terminate the employment of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, many of them union members. Federal workers, Trump claimed, are “destroying this country,” and are “crooked” and “dishonest.” “Many of them,” he said, “don’t work at all.”

To supervise his massive purge of public employees, Trump chose Elon Musk―the world’s wealthiest individual and largest donor to his presidential campaign―to direct a mysterious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Delighted with the job, Musk declared, without any evidence, that there were “people on the government payroll who are dead” and others “who are not real people.” Addressing a conference of conservatives, the flamboyant........

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