Teamsters President Sean O’Brien prompted an internal rebellion at his union last month when he addressed the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. O’Brien didn’t endorse Donald Trump, but his appearance at Trump’s coronation sent a strong message — one the union chief now seems to be trying to temper.
On Tuesday, O’Brien responded critically to a Monday night interview between Trump and right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, during which the former president praised Musk’s union-busting tactics at his various companies.
“I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk, laughing. “You walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike — I won’t mention the name of the company — but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”
In a statement to Politico, O’Brien responded to the interview by noting that “firing workers for organizing, striking, and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism.”
O’Brien’s statement is a blow to Trump’s efforts to court the union’s endorsement. Last month, O’Brien addressed Republicans gathered at the RNC to crown Trump as their nominee. His speech prompted the Teamsters’ X (formerly Twitter) account to post a disavowal of his appearance, and a challenge to his position as head of the organization by Teamsters Vice President-at-Large John Palmer.
According to ABC News, O’Brien and other members of the Teamsters leadership met with Trump ahead of the convention. “Before departing the union’s headquarters, the former president directly told those in attendance that the Teamsters would have a seat at the table if a potential endorsement was made for a second administration,” the union’s magazine reported in July.
The Teamsters are the largest union not to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, and O’Brien is facing pressure from disgruntled factions upset over his RNC appearance. On Tuesday, the Teamsters National Black Caucus broke with its parent organization and voted unanimously to endorse Harris.
“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have consistently demonstrated their unwavering commitment to workers and their families. Their records reflect a deep dedication to advancing labor rights and supporting working-class Americans,” the caucus wrote in a statement announcing their endorsement. “In stark contrast, former President Donald Trump has consistently undermined workers’ rights, fueled divisiveness, and discriminated against marginalized communities.”
Trump’s comments on Tuesday have also reaffirmed other major unions opposition to his candidacy. The United Auto Workers Union quickly filed a lawsuit against Musk and Trump over their “illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers.”
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement on Tuesday. “Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
The UAW endorsed Harris’ run for the White House last week, joining a growing coalition of organized labor groups in backing the vice president.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”