Amid the resurrection of the “big lie” about a stolen election by Donald Trump, another misleading topic came up at this weekend’s right-wing meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference: Republicans as the true workers’ party.
It was a concept promoted in various ways in the first two days of CPAC by, among others, a former multimillionaire governor who made a fortune in the health field; the son of Donald Trump, who lives in his exclusive club in Florida; and two arsonist American senators trained in law by Ivy League universities who oppose a universal minimum wage increase to $ 15 an hour.
One of them, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, earlier this month took his family on a sunny holiday at a five-star resort in Mexico to escape the deadly winter blast in his home state. At CPAC, he affirmed his alignment with America’s working men and women.
“The Republican Party is not just a country club party; the Republican Party is the party of steel workers and construction workers, and pipeline workers and taxi drivers, and police and firefighters, and waiters and waitresses, and the calloused men and women who are working for this country. ” , Cruz said at the country’s largest annual meeting of popular conservatives, just days after interrupting his holiday in Cancún, when the scandal surfaced.
“This is our party, and these deplorable ones are here to stay.”
The CPAC’s position to try to represent the Republican Party as a champion of the working class comes at a time when Democratic President Joe Biden’s effort to raise the minimum wage faces significant obstacles in Congress, including the opposition of many senior Republican figures.
Cruz, a Harvard-educated lawyer and beneficiary of substantial corporate campaign donations, at least until many contributions stopped following the January 6 Capitol riots, is a longtime opponent of what he called the concept of “bad politics” “of a minimum wage, and said that legislation to apply it” would kill American jobs “.
Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who last month joined Cruz, his faithful colleague to Trump, in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s victory, was another prominent CPAC speaker defending working-class roots while opposing salary proposals of the new president.
“Where I come from in Missouri, I grew up in rural Missouri, [a] a small town right in the middle of Missouri, it’s a working class city full of good people, working hard to survive every day, ”said Hawley, a graduate of Yale law school.
“And I can only tell you, where I grew up, we believe in citizenship because we are proud of it. We are proud to be Americans, ”he added in a speech condemning“ powerful corporations ”and“ oligarchs ”that he accused of imposing a“ radical left agenda ”on the United States.
Hawley, considered a possible candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest if Trump does not run again, also suffered a corporate backlash for his support of the former president’s lies in the election. He proposed legislation this month that would exempt small businesses from paying their employees an “onerous” minimum wage.
On Saturday at CPAC, allegiance continued to Trump, who was honored at the conference site this week with the installation of a large gaudy statue that spawned the hashtag #goldencalf on Twitter.
“The return of the workers was the theme of our administration,” said Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, in a panel discussion on the industry during which he praised “President Trump’s leadership” for job growth.
KT McFarland, a conservative commentator who was briefly deputy national security adviser to Trump at the start of his administration, said she received a phone call with the former president on Friday night when he allegedly outlined the topic of his scheduled speech from the CPAC on Sunday.
“I don’t think Donald Trump ended this revolution,” she said, describing how she called the resort at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach and claiming that Trump himself answered the phone.
“He said, ‘I’m going to talk about the future. I will talk about how we will win in 2022, how we will recover the White House in 2024 ‘”.
Trump’s son Donald Jr told CPAC attendees at the beginning of the meeting that Biden’s relaxation of Trump-era immigration measures and the reopening of camps for young migrants would affect the very workers that Republicans are trying to covet.
“Where is the indignation about an asylum immigration policy that encourages people to bring unaccompanied or unaccompanied children to a country?” he said.
“Guess who gets hurt? Our low-income workers, who for the first time in modern history under Donald Trump have begun to see real wage growth. “
Rick Scott, Florida’s junior senator and former governor, and a staunch ally of Trump, warned Republicans that abandoning the former president would alienate the party’s base.
“We are not going to win the future by trying to get back to where the Republican Party used to be. If we do, we will lose the base of work that President Trump has so excited, ”said Scott, a former health executive whose personal net worth has been estimated at more than half a billion dollars.
“We are going to lose elections across the country and, in the end, we are going to lose our nation.
Analysts say there is nothing unusual about Republicans courting job votes, even if the messenger’s choice is questionable.
“From an academic perspective, we are really looking at what appears to be a realignment of the coalitions that are supporting each party, and particularly among white working-class individuals,” said Dr. Susan MacManus, professor emeritus of political science at the University of South Florida.
“All you have to do is take a look at the vote for the presidential election and see who Donald Trump’s biggest supporters are, with virtually no college education, white workers.
“Is there a disconnect between the wealth and education of the leaders of both parties? Yes, but that’s where it comes from. “