Trump Serves Up One Last Insult to Working-Class Voters

The working class may love Donald Trump, but Trump doesn’t love it back. This is a point I’ve tried to emphasize throughout the campaign season.

Three Trump judges this year issued injunctions backing a campaign by Trump’s new best friend, Elon Musk, to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board, the only federal agency that adjudicates disputes between labor and management. Trump wants to scale back overtime coverage from the current four million workers to a stingy one million. (That’s what he tried to do when he was president.) For seven years—appropriately, the length of a biblical plague!—I’ve wondered whether working stiffs who support Trump harbor some sort of death wish. Just last week Trump carried on like a lunatic because he thought something was wrong with his microphone (even though it appeared to be working just fine). “You want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?” said this tribune of the proletariat. “So … stupid.”

Now Trump is weighing his choices for labor secretary if he wins, and the “top contenders,” reports Lauren Kaori Gurley in The Washington Post (citing “three people involved in discussions”) include Andrew Puzder, the former chief executive of CKE Restaurants (Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr.).

I’ll retire to Bedlam.

If the name “Andrew Puzder” strikes a familiar ring, that’s because Puzder became the first Trump Cabinet nominee (of three) to fail to clear Senate confirmation after Politico posted online video of his first wife, Lisa Fierstein, telling Oprah Winfrey, in a 1990 program titled “High Class Battered Women,” that Puzder threatened to “see [her] in the gutter” if she made public allegations that he physically abused her.

Two years earlier, Fierstein had stated, in a petition seeking $350,000 in damages, that Puzder “assaulted and battered me by striking me violently about the face, chest, back, shoulders and neck, without provocation or cause.” As a result, Fierstein continued, she suffered “bruises and contusions to the chest, back, shoulders and neck” and “two ruptured discs and two bulging discs.” The judge denied the damages on the grounds that a previous divorce agreement had settled all Fierstein’s existing claims against Puzder.

In retrospect, it’s amazing that Trump ever nominated Puzder, for labor secretary or anything else, given that the wife-beating allegations had been known publicly since 1989. But Puzder denied the charges, and Fierstein retracted them as part of a child custody agreement. Fierstein reaffirmed the retraction in an email to Puzder shortly before his nomination. “You were not abusive,” she wrote, and hinted that the allegations were her divorce lawyer’s idea.

Probably because of that email, the press mostly let sleeping dogs lie. But within hours after Politico’s Marianne LeVine (now a Washington Post reporter) uploaded the Oprah footage to Politico’s website, Puzder withdrew his nomination. (The reason I remember all this so well is I edited Politico’s coverage, and later detailed this whole saga in The New York Review of Books.)

The Oprah video was very damning. Fierstein wore a disguise—a wig and dark sunglasses—but otherwise she seemed perfectly calm and rational. Noting that Puzder had at the time of their marriage been a public figure—co-chair, in Missouri, of an anti-abortion gubernatorial task force—Fierstein told Oprah:

Most men who are in positions like that don’t leave marks. The damage that I sustained you can’t see. It’s permanent damage, but there’s no marks, and there never was. They don’t hit you in the face. They’re too smart.

The wife-beating allegations were the most Gothic knock against Puzder, but his nomination was already in trouble when the Oprah tape surfaced. On Puzder’s watch, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found health and safety violations in more than half its inspections of the fast-food restaurants his company owned, according to two researchers at the Century Fund. Puzder opposed raising the minimum wage even to $10.10, writing in 2014, “If government could transform unskilled entry-level positions into middle-income jobs, the Soviet Union would be today’s dominant world economy.” Five years earlier Puzder had sanctimoniously fired his housekeeper when he found out she was undocumented, yet he didn’t pay her state and federal employment taxes until after his nomination. “Andrew Puzder fails every test for a labor secretary,” the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute concluded.

After he withdrew his nomination, Puzder became a full-time Trump sycophant, a role he continues in to this day. After Robert Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump, Puzder penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing, absurdly, that the younger Kennedy’s views were more in tune with John F. Kennedy’s than Kamala Harris’s were. On Fox News’s website, Puzder wrote that Trump would “spur economic growth by cutting taxes, slashing growth-killing regulations, and incentivizing domestic energy production.” Many of those regulations would be at the Labor Department! On National Review’s website, Puzder wrote that Trump’s idiotic plan to not tax tips had “the income-enhancing benefits of a minimum-wage increase without the risks—such as reduced working hours, automation and job displacement, or business closures.” Apparently Puzder thinks a pay raise for entry-level workers won’t Sovietize the economy provided the government pays for it.

Puzder is a good MAGA soldier. He’s also just about the worst possible candidate for labor secretary. Would any candidate who cared about working people—or about protecting women “whether the women like it or not”—give Andrew Puzder a second thought? Of course he wouldn’t.