Trump, The Pro Labor President?
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| President Trump has named a fox to guard the henhouse. He has picked Eugene Scalia, a successful corporate lawyer (and the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia), who has spent his career battling labor, to be the next secretary of labor. That’s like appointing Lysistrata to be secretary of war, or Genghis Khan to be minister of culture. |
| While Trump has purported to be a champion of the working man, he has pursued arguably the most anti-labor agenda of any recent president. Generally I think we need a reassessment about labor unions. There’s a broad disdain among many Americans toward unions, but the evidence is mounting that unions were a bulwark against inequality. So while I once shared that disdain, I’ve come around to the view that we need strong unions to check inequality and out-of-control corporate interests. Here’s my new column on my own reassessment. |
| I’m a longtime advocate of tougher gun safety measures, so I’m thrilled to see such measures gaining traction in both Congress and state legislatures — albeit at a terrible cost, after two mass shootings. Gun advocates often say that it’s mostly just gang members who get shot, but more than 100 people a day — all kinds of people — die from guns in America, including suicides, murders and accidents. More preschoolers die from guns each year than police officers do, as I wrote in this article, How To Reduce Shootings. My best guess is that if we adopted a public health approach, we could reduce gun deaths in America by about one-third, saving some 13,000 lives a year. |
| Two obvious first steps are universal background checks before getting a gun, and red-flag laws to remove guns from people who pose a danger to themselves or others. I’d also like to raise the age to buy a gun to 21, from 18, to match the age to buy alcohol. |
| We should ban the sale of AR-15 rifles and large-capacity magazines. Defenders are correct that the bullet is modest-sized, but the problem is that they can be fired rapidly and then a new magazine swapped in so as to keep firing. Someone with a 30-06 rifle will kill far fewer people, even though it uses a bigger bullet, because it has a smaller capacity and takes much longer to reload. |
| And while I don’t think it’s likely to happen soon, I’d ultimately like to see licensing for gun-owners as for car-owners, safe storage requirements, and investments in smart weapons that require a fingerprint or pin to fire. By the way, if your Uncle Harry is a die-hard gun-owner, here’s my 2018 column on how to win an argument over guns. |
| This will be difficult to understand for many of my readers, but President Trump’s approval ratings have been inching upward. As my Times colleague Nate Cohn writes: “The share of Americans who say they have a favorable view of him has increased significantly since the 2016 election… Over all, his personal favorability rating has increased by about 10 percentage points among registered voters since Election Day 2016.” My bet is that Trump will be defeated for reelection (and may end up a convicted felon), but I also think it’s quite possible that I’m wrong. Much will depend on the economy: if it remains strong, Trump will be very competitive; if it weakens, as I believe likely, Trump is much more vulnerable. |
| More evidence that I have the best readers: Some third-graders in Winnetka, Ill., have turned a recommendation I offered for the group Reach Out and Read into this podcast. Congrats to the third-graders and to their teacher, David Green — and to Reach Out and Read, for its outstanding work promoting literacy among disadvantaged kids. And because Reach Out and Read piggybacks on pediatrician visits, it’s remarkably cost-effective, at only $20 per child per year. |
| I’m out in Oregon taking some vacation (and doing some work related to my next book with Sheryl!), so I may not have a column for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, keep an eye on Hong Kong and the China trade war; if the People’s Liberation Army moves on the protesters in Hong Kong, I’m on the next flight there. And here’s my column on the unfairly maligned labor movement in America. I wouldn’t have said this a decade ago, but given the struggles of working class America, I’ve become a believer that we should strengthen unions rather than allow Trump to eviscerate them further. Read the column! |
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| What I’m Reading |
| Today’s column was inspired by Steven Greenhouse’s superb new book, “Beaten Down, Worked Up,” about the history of the labor movement. I learned a lot from it, and I recommend it highly. |
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