MILWAUKEE —A determined AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler warned workers and voters of the massive threat of the Donald Trump-commissioned Project 2025 at a Democratic-called “counter” press conference during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee but as Shuler and others looked on, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., stole the show.
“We had four years of Donald Trump,” said Booker, referring to the Republican’s first White House term, before his so-far-probable Democratic foe, President Joe Biden “What they’re saying right now” on the convention floor “is so undermined by what Donald Trump did.
But the senator was just getting wound up. After contrasting Biden’s pro-worker record at OSHA versus Trump’s on sending unprotected meatpacking workers to slice carcasses during the coronavirus plague–among other disparities–Booker pointed out about Trump “I know this guy.”
“You have a president (Biden) who walks picket lines versus one who walked through an IATSE picket line. There’s photos of it.” But after yet more facts that Booker said workers should put side-by-side, he launched into his oration.
“You can’t lead people if you don’t love people. And I think the way you talk about other people is more a reflection of who you are than who the other person is.
“I’ve listened to Donald Trump way before he was a politician,” Booker explained. He’s a former Newark mayor who looked to revitalize his city and Trump was a Big Apple area developer.
“He talks in degrading ways about people and places. He talks about women, he talks about his own [Republican] people who don’t support him. He attacks people’s weaknesses and disabilities.
“Tamping down the political rhetoric is not enough” as politicians from both parties, including Biden, urged after the assassination attempt on Trump a few days before, the senator said.
“Look at people who are going to lead with love, who are going to raise up your community, who are going to raise up your country. Who support people who say ‘Even if you’re not going to vote for me, you’re not my enemy.’
‘Choose who you want in the White House. Are they—excuse my language—people who talk about shithole countries? Or a president who sees every nation has potentialities and wants to work in partnership?
“The thing we need in this country is patriotism. Patriotism is love of country. But you cannot love your country unless you love your countrymen.”
You get the idea. Booker was a hard act for Shuler or anyone else, to precede, much less follow.
Democratic Chair Jaime Harrison called the July 17 session to better acquaint reporters covering the convention with the negative impact, on workers, voters, rights and jobs of Project 2025, a detailed 922-page tome, issue by issue and agency by agency, of how Trump and his minions would centralize all power in the White House.
They’d also wreck civil and voter rights, cut taxes even more for companies and the corporate class—while raising them on workers by eliminating deductions and even the standard exemption from your tax returns–make Trump a dictator far beyond day one, trash Social Security and Medicare and slam workers’ rights, too.
That last threat was Shuler’s to handle, before the senator started sounding the gospel of what a divided nation would look like if Trump succeeded in implementing his plans—and what it could look like if Trump lost.
Both parties used to believe “when workers did better, the country did better,” Shuler began. Occasionally, such as on the infrastructure law, which will benefit union workers, that still happens, she admitted. But Trump, ultra-rightists, anti-worker lawmakers and tycoons now dominate the GOP, and the result is Project 2025.
“This 2025 agenda is the exact opposite,” Shuler said. “It does not make America wealthy again. It makes the richest even richer.”
“Ask yourself: ‘Does this Project 2025 agenda make my life better? Would it better if these Project 2025 extremists eliminate my union? Would it be better when they take away my ability to bargain a fair contract? Or go on strike?
“Will my life be better when Donald Trump lets my company force me to work without overtime pay? And will my life be better when they gut the ACA and rip away affordable health care?
“Or when they end Social Security and Medicare as we know it? Workers have paid into these programs for their entire lives and J.D. Vance,” the Ohio senator whom Trump named as his running mate “calls them ‘the biggest roadblocks to fiscal sanity.’”
“And will my life be better when Trump, Vance and these extremists hand over even more power to billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk?”
“That’s what the Republican Party is telling us they really want to do” via Project 2025, said Shuler.
The entire press conference—preaching and all–is available here.
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