Politics

This is the new progressive strategy for warring with Trump

Published

2 years ago

November 25, 2024

Progressive Democrats wrestling with how to navigate a second Donald Trump presidency are settling on a new approach: Take his populist, working-class proposals at his word — or at least pretend to.

If he succeeds, they can take some credit for bringing him to the table. If he doesn’t, they can bash him for it.

It’s a change in strategy, emerging in private conversations among some liberal elected officials and operatives, that comes after years of resisting Trump ended with him returning to the White House.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in an interview that she would likely work with Trump if he pursues antitrust promises he made on the campaign trail. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he sees himself partnering with Trump to tackle “large corporate consolidations,” while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) posted on X that he “looked forward” to Trump “fulfilling his promise” to cap credit card interest rates.

Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the resistance icon who popularized the motto “nevertheless, she persisted” while skewering a Trump cabinet pick in 2017, is finding common cause with the president-elect.

“President Trump announced during his campaign that he intended to put a 10 percent interest rate cap on consumer credit,” Warren told Blue Light News. “Bring it on.”

But, she added, “if he refuses to follow through on the campaign promises that would help working people, then he should be held accountable.”

An aide to a progressive member of Congress, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, stated the obvious: Liberal Democrats will continue to oppose most of what Trump does “tooth and nail.”

However, the person said, “For the few policy proposals that we think will help the working class, capping credit card interest rates being one of them, we’ll say, ‘Put up or shut up.’ Because if he does, it’s a great win for millions of people across this country. And if he doesn’t, it exposes him as a fraud that he is.”

Progressives are not suddenly buying MAGA hats, and with Trump not yet in office, the range of ways they may engage him — or oppose him — remains a work in progress. They are still appalled by Trump’s behavior and policies, including his plans to create the largest deportation program in history, cut taxes for the wealthy and roll back transgender rights. And many of them fear that Trump is an aspiring dictator who threatens democracy itself (which Trump allies have said is unfounded).

But some of Trump’s populist campaign promises fall in line with progressives’ own aspirations. Those include making in vitro fertilization treatments free, ending taxes on tips and capping credit card interest rates. He has also promised for years to protect the popular programs of Social Security and Medicare. At times, he has promoted directing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

When asked for comment, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said, “President Trump’s America First policies will help uplift all Americans and Democrats know voters are now firmly behind him, as opposed to their failed and tired policies that have devastated this country for the last four years.”

And some of Trump’s allies have also backed a handful of other ideas that progressives support, from slashing the Pentagon to strictly enforcing antitrust laws.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who has been charged by Trump with downsizing the federal government, appeared to agree with progressive Rep. Ro Khanna in a recent thread on X that the Department of Defense spends too much money on contractors.

Sen. Bernie Sanders posted on X that he “looked forward” to Trump “fulfilling his promise” to cap credit card interest rates.

Top Trump ally Matt Gaetz, whom the president-elect tapped for attorney general but has since withdrawn, has praised Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Khan is revered on the left for infuriating Wall Street and aggressively busting up monopolies. Though Khan is not expected to stay on under Trump, and Musk said she would be “fired soon,” Vice President-elect JD Vance has also spoken positively about her and called for breaking up Big Tech.

Last week, Khan returned the favor at an FTC meeting, saying that she is “so grateful and appreciative of the bipartisan support” for her work, “including from Vice President-elect Vance and formerly Congressman Gaetz.”

Progressives are clear-eyed that with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, many, if not most, of Trump’s populist campaign promises will not happen — if he were ever serious about them to begin with. But they believe that his voters want him to follow through. They also lack any power in Congress and are desperate for even an outside chance to influence policy.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, said that his group conducted polling in the critical battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan during the final week of the election. He said the surveys, done in conjunction with the liberal firm Data for Progress, found that the majority of Trump’s voters want him to crack down on price gouging, raise taxes on billionaires, and strengthen anti-monopoly laws.

“Trump actually made promises to people, like helping those on Social Security, ending taxes on tips, and capping credit card interest at 10 percent,” he said. “His own voters believe he has a mandate on that, plus higher taxes on billionaires and big corporations. So let’s hold a mirror up to him and ask, are you going to be a hypocrite or not?”

Not all progressives agree with that strategy. Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a member of the so-called Squad, said of Trump, “I’ve never gotten the impression that he’s been accountable to anything in his life.” But, she said, “I don’t fault anybody for trying.”

Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said that holding Trump’s feet to the fire in Congress is “a little bit unrealistic — we don’t have the votes.” But he said there is room to advocate for liberal policies.

“If there’s areas we agree, let’s work together and get them done: credit card fees, cap on interest rates, prescription drug reference pricing,” he said. “I’m all about working on things that are going to help working-class people.”

Either way, it’s not 2017 anymore. And Resistance 2.0 won’t look exactly the same as its first era.

“There’ll be places where resistance is appropriate,” said Warren. “For example, if Trump follows his V.P. JD Vance in trying to ban access to abortion nationwide through the FDA, there will be massive resistance. If Trump follows through on his promises for more tax cuts for billionaires and billionaire corporations, we’re going to be in that fight all the way.”

At the same time, she said, “if Trump is going to lower interest rates on all consumer loans to 10 percent, count me in.”

Politics

A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs

Published

45 minutes ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countriesusing a legal justification that permits the president to levy import taxes and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices.

The new tariffs announced in recent days take effect just as temporary 10% worldwide tariffs expiredand critics say they are less about cracking down on forced labor than they are a way to replace those tariffs. The expired tariffs were themselves a temporary replacement for worldwide tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.

The tariffs were levied on countries that the U.S. says either don’t have or don’t effectively enforce a forced-labor import ban. The affected countrieswhich account for 99% of U.S. imports, were quick to protest, calling the Trump administration’s claims unfounded and arbitrary, as nations with vastly different records on forced labor received the same tariff level. The U.S. spent four months investigating but gave few details on how it arrived at the tariff rates, which are either 10% or 12.5%.

Sidestepping Congress

The tariffs were levied under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on countries that the U.S. determined had failed “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

During President Donald Trump ‘s first term, he cited Section 301 to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports amid a dispute over the sharp-elbowed tactics Beijing was using to challenge America’s technological dominance. The U.S. is also using 301 powers to counter what it calls unfair Chinese practices in the shipbuilding industry.

“The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute,” said Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”

Little evidence that countries failed to enforce import bans

The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) said it consulted with all 60 economies under investigation and held two rounds of public hearings, elicited more than 2,100 public comments, and had “engagement” with its trading partners about what they were doing to combat forced labor bans.

It didn’t detail its talks with the countries, saying those were confidential. Experts say it is fairly straightforward to investigate whether a country has a ban or not, but it is difficult to determine the government’s exact rationale for each country’s failure to enforce import bans.

“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”

And even if countries do enact and enforce the forced-labor import bans the U.S. wants, they would still need to prove that they’re enforcing them to Washington’s satisfaction before the tariffs would be removed, said lawyer Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official.

“This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.

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Countries and industries reject the forced labor argument

Many countries have pushed back against the Trump administration’s findings.

Brazil, which faces a 12.5% forced-labor tariff, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified.” The U.S. “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices,” it said in a statement.

Australia also questioned the justification for its 12.5% tariff.

“We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters in Adelaide.

Carve-outs have riled some industries. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), which describes itself as the voice of the American textile industry, protested a mechanism that exempts the Section 301 tariffs for textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia based on those countries’ imports of U.S. cotton and textiles.

“No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” NCTO chief executive Kim Glas said in a statement. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”

US forced-labor bans don’t always work

The U.S. has two major pieces of legislation related to forced-labor import bans. The Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the authority to seize shipments where forced labor was suspected and to block further imports. But it had a big carve-out: If there was “consumptive demand,” meaning there wasn’t sufficient supply to meet domestic demand, imports were allowed regardless of how they were produced. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act that took effect in 2016 eliminated that loophole.

In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was passed. It blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless businesses can prove the items were made without forced labor.

But goods made with forced labor can still make it into the U.S. In 2015, an Associated Press investigation found that slave labor was used in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The seafood they caught made its way to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.

An investigation by The Associated Press in 2020 into the $65 billion palm oil industry found labor abuses among an invisible workforce consisting of millions of men, women and children in Asia. The fruit they harvested made its way into the supply chains of major companies, including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.

Calls for a more comprehensive approach to combat forced labor

During hearings on the tariffs this month, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold, who was representing the business coalition the Joint Association Forced Labor Working Group at the hearing, said that in order for the import bans to work, they would have to be much more extensive.

He said there need to be “clear, measurable benchmarks” tied to tariffs for countries to hit, and that the U.S. should help countries build enforcement programs.

Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, said an effective ban needs a “comprehensive approach” that provides transparency about what the investigations consisted of, along with programs that provide countries aid in enforcing bans.

Politics

El-Sayed comes under fire for ‘ogre on a pike’ leaked comment

Published

3 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing backlash from within his own party after using controversial rhetoric to describe the stakes of his victory in a recent donor meeting.

“You put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different,” El-Sayed said, describing how his win could propel the progressive movement, according to audio of a Zoom meeting obtained by POLITICO.

On Monday, several Democrats were quick to slam his comments, which they took as direct reference to his Senate primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed had not explicitly mentioned Stevens in the portion of the call Blue Light News reviewed.

“Calling your female opponent an ogre you want to put on a pike is not beating the rap that this race has some serious sexism,” Neera Tanden, a centrist Democrat and president of the Center for American Progress, posted on X. Melissa Byrne, a former staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, called the remark an “unforced error” that is “really bad and beneath the progressive project.”

El-Sayed’s leaked comments and the reaction to them amount to another flashpoint in a tense primary that is dividing the progressive and moderate wings of the party, and at times has been defined by accusations of racism and sexism.

“Abdul continues with personal insults and making this race about his personal political ambitions and the other 49 states,” said Arik Wolk, spokesperson for the Stevens campaign. “Haley is focused on getting things done for Michigan, and only Michigan.”

Republicans also immediately jumped on the comment, and some leaned into stereotypes of El-Sayed’s religion as a Muslim. “Michigan Islamist discusses beheading his opponents,” said Steve Guest, a former staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz, on X.

An El-Sayed campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the backlash. A spokesperson had previously told Blue Light News that the candidate was “speaking metaphorically” about his intention to support a primary against Sen. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania.

This is not the first time El-Sayed has used — and defended — aggressive political rhetoric. “When they go low, we don’t go high,” the progressive said while speaking at a campaign rally earlier this year, riffing on a famous line from former first lady Michelle Obama. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.”

He and Stevens will face off in their final Democratic Senate debate Monday night, and the results of the Aug. 4 primary could have major consequences for the party as it grapples with its ideological tack ahead of the 2028 presidential election.