Though the most significant trend in American politics today is the movement of the nation’s working class into the Trumpified Republicans’ column, that clearly doesn’t mean that the Trumpified Republicans are in any way pro-worker. In the few short weeks since it took power, the new administration has begun to strip civil service protections from the federal workforce and nullify the rights of private-sector workers by rendering the National Labor Relations Board powerless to defend those rights, due to Trump’s firing of a Board member and thereby shrinking the Board to the point where it lacks a quorum to address any worker grievances.

But the administration is not the sole mover in the party’s war on workers. Last week, Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, signed into law a bill that will strip collective-bargaining rights from all the public employees in the state: teachers, cops, firefighters, nurses in public hospitals, and so on. In so doing, Utah joins the two least-unionized states in the nation, North and South Carolina, in their blanket ban on collective bargaining for public employees. Now, the state and its cities and counties will never have to raise their workers’ wages or provide them with adequate health insurance. In that sense, the new law also restricts workers’ ability to advance their careers through market forces: A firefighter who can’t get a raise in Salt Lake City isn’t any more likely to get a raise by moving to Provo. To gain any power over his or her working conditions will now require moving to a different state.

But then, the Trump and Republican appeal to the working class hasn’t ever really addressed their aspirations and rights as workers. Rather, it has emphasized the Democrats’ purported neglect of their interests by dwelling on and magnifying the Democrats’ positions on cultural issues, and in the 2024 election, on the Democrats’ responsibility for the high cost of living. It has appealed to the working class, that is, in their roles as consumers and cultural traditionalists (or their place in the cultural mainstream).

Trump’s only appeal to workers as workers has been confined to workers in particular sectors, most especially fossil fuel workers (coal miners, oil field and refinery workers) and autoworkers making gas-powered cars. This appeal is certainly not about their rights on the job, or even their safety on the job (OSHA during Trump’s first term did nothing to protect workers from COVID), but rather his commitment to increase employment in his favored sectors of the economy, provided that they keep the levels of pollution and climate change from diminishing.

The common thread in the Republicans’ attacks on both civil service and workers’ rights is their hostility to skilled, professional workforces with the right to defend their work and seek adequate reward for their skills and professionalism. The -ism that Trump hates most is empiricism—the ability of government workers to follow the facts rather than follow his diktats. Trump is far from alone in this anti-empirical impulse. One of the leading indicators of the shift of professionals and college graduates into the Democrats’ column over the past couple of decades has been the flow of scientists into Democratic ranks. As far back as 2009, a Pew poll of scientists found that 55 percent described themselves as Democrats, 32 percent as independents, and just 6 percent as Republicans. Those percentages stayed roughly the same, Pew documented, whether those scientists worked in academia, for the government, for nonprofits, or for private industry. In the mid-20th century, when Republican leaders like Dwight Eisenhower were accustomed to relying on scientific discoveries and were empiricists themselves, there were plenty of Republican scientists. Since then, however, the growing concentration of primitive religiosity and conspiracy theories within the Republican base has clearly been a major factor driving scientists—those arch-empiricists—from Republican ranks. The presence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. atop HHS will almost surely reduce that 6 percent by a point or two.

Meanwhile, the Republican war on workers’ rights and workers’ skills continues unabated.