The GOP convention speech that won’t go away

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Aug 09, 2024 View in browser   By Peder Schaefer President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Sean O'Brien speaks at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 15, 2024. | ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images CROSSING THE LINE — For the most part, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month went exactly as expected — a coronation for Donald Trump. Except, that is, for one speech that rankled partisans on both sides. That would be Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s fiery, pro-worker, anti-corporate speech to Republican delegates on the convention’s first night. In addition to alienating some Republicans who chafed at its tone, O’Brien’s speech — which a fellow Teamster leader dubbed “unconscionable” — sparked a backlash within organized labor, where unionists accused O’Brien of lending credibility to a party that has done little to support the policy priorities of unions. O’Brien has now attracted a challenger for the union’s internal presidential election in 2026. O’Brien’s RNC speech revealed the tensions within the labor movement in recent years as union leaders wrestle with the challenge of Trump-supporting rank and file members and the new populist-orientation of the Republican Party. The address also served to remind Democrats that organized labor’s support can’t be taken for granted in November. “The problem that union leaders have right now is that they historically have emphasized economic issues,” said Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment relations at Penn State University. “The frustration for unions is that they can’t address the social and cultural issues that are pulling more working people toward Trump and Republicans.” “O’Brien knows that a whole lot of his members are registered Republicans and are supporting Donald Trump,” added Clark. “It’s a percentage that he would ignore at his peril.” Historically, the Teamsters have been a more conservative union. The union has endorsed Republicans for president in the past, such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. But the challenge facing Teamsters leadership today is a familiar one across unions. The number of union members supporting Republicans has grown markedly in recent years, with several polls from earlier this year suggesting that the trend could be accelerating in 2024. That’s leading to a tricky situation for union leaders, who must reconcile that development with the traditionally pro-union record of the Democratic Party. Under the Biden administration, for example, Democrats included tens of billions to bail out union pensions  in the American Rescue Plan, named pro-union lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board and have voiced continued support for the PRO Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize. Much of organized labor, including the United Auto Workers and the teachers unions, has already fallen in line behind Kamala Harris following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. Still, failing to win over the Teamsters union, which has over 1.3 million members, would constitute a blow to Democrats. In the wake of O’Brien’s RNC speech, the relationship is strained. The union said that Harris had not yet responded to a request to have a roundtable discussion with Teamsters’ leaders, and that O’Brien had not received an invite from Democrats to speak before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Teamsters’ rank and file are currently voting on the candidates to show their presidential preference, but union leaders will ultimately make the final endorsement decision. The backlash against O’Brien began even before his speech. John Palmer, a vice president of the Teamsters, wrote a column attacking O’Brien’s choice to speak before the RNC in the Las Vegas Sun, writing that doing so “only normalizes and makes palatable the most anti-union party and president [Trump] I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Palmer later published a letter declaring his candidacy against O’Brien in 2026, writing that the Teamsters president was “kissing the ring of a man that had scabbed a picket line” and that “we have successfully estranged ourselves from the rest of the labor movement.” As politically perilous as his RNC speech was, it elevated O’Brien’s national profile and represented a rare opportunity for a union leader to speak directly to a large audience of Republicans. “The part that is unprecedented is O’Brien attacking corporate America for being anti-worker,” said Robert Bruno, the director of the labor education program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “I can’t think of any Republican convention where a speaker, let alone a union president, spoke so critically of the base of the Republican Party. He went in there and stunned the crowd.” Kara Deniz, a spokesperson for the Teamsters, said that the convention’s large television audience made it an ideal platform to spread a pro-worker message. Over 18 million Americans tuned in for the first night of the convention, according to Nielsen. During his address, O’Brien attacked the Republican Party for standing in opposition to unions, declared that the Teamsters are “not beholden to anyone or any party” but also nodded toward Republicans who have made limited public displays of support for unions, such as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. (Both Hawley and Vance have received poor marks on their pro-union voting records from the AFL-CIO.) “We are going to support the elected leaders who support workers,” said Deniz for the Teamsters. “We are not just going to blindly support candidates based on their past record if they’re not doing something for us at the moment.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at pederschaeferwriting@gmail.com.   During unprecedented times, POLITICO Pro Analysis gives you the insights you need to focus your policy strategy. Live briefings, policy trackers, and and people intelligence secures your seat at the table. Learn more.     What'd I Miss? — Judge OKs special counsel’s request for three-week delay in election-subversion case against Trump: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has signed off on a three-week delay in Donald Trump’s federal election case at the request of special counsel Jack Smith. It’s the first time Smith has ever sought a slowdown in the case, in which the former president is charged with conspiring to steal the 2020 election and disenfranchise millions of voters. For more than a year, amid numerous efforts by Trump to delay, the special counsel argued that the gravity of the historic case required urgency and should be brought before a jury expeditiously. But Smith’s request to postpone a filing deadline this week is an acknowledgment that any chance of bringing the case to trial in the near future has all but disappeared. — White House set to unveil Medicare price negotiation savings: The White House is expected to describe the results Thursday of its first Medicare negotiations for the price of 10 prescription drugs, according to three people with knowledge of the planning. The announcement would come one day before the second anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, the law giving the federal health insurer for older Americans the authority to haggle with drugmakers over the price of their products. Completion of the first negotiations would represent a milestone for the White House, which has made negotiating lower drug prices a centerpiece of its domestic agenda amid opposition from Republicans and the pharmaceutical industry. — Judge orders CDC to stop deleting emails of departing staff, calling it ‘likely unlawful’: The CDC has likely been violating federal law for years by systematically deleting lower-level employees’ emails, a federal judge ruled Friday. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras came in a lawsuit brought by a legal group allied with former President Donald Trump and was accompanied by an order forcing the public health agency to immediately halt the erasures. Nightly Road to 2024 PODCASTERS FOR RFK JR  — Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earned endorsements from top podcasters Joe Rogan and Russell Brand in the presidential race. Kennedy has devoted the majority of his media strategy to alternative and independent creators, and the investment is paying off with endorsements in the critical last days of the campaign. ABOUT THAT CHOPPER ANECDOTE — Former President Donald Trump’s apparently false tale of surviving a helicopter emergency landing with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown wasn’t a one-off. Trump, who told the story in a rambling news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, recounted it at least once before — in a 2023 book. In either case, it’s not true. At least not according to Brown, a political icon in California who served as the Assembly Speaker for 14 years in the 1980s and 1990s. “You would have known if I had gone down on a helicopter with Trump,” Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I’ve never been on a helicopter with Trump.” Trump used the anecdote to take a swipe at a surging Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that the former mayor told him “terrible things” about her. WALZ’S CHINA TIES — Washington and Beijing are figuring out what to make of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s connections to China and how they might shape policy towards the U.S. adversary if he and Vice President Kamala Harris win in November. At 25 years old, Walz taught in China at the same time as the Tiananmen Square protests, earning the nickname “Fields of China” among his students. He went there on a honeymoon with his wife, Gwen, and two groups of American high schoolers, and visited 30 more times in the years afterward. And in Congress, he established himself as an advocate for human rights in China and a critic of its government. LULAC BREAKS TRADITION — The League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations, said on Friday that it supported Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the first formal endorsement of a presidential ticket in the group’s 95-year history. Leaders of the group, known as LULAC, acknowledged that it had previously refrained from endorsing political candidates but said that members were stirred to action by concerns over the potential negative impact on Latinos if former President Donald J. Trump were elected again, the New York Times reports. AROUND THE WORLD Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends a joint meeting with Britain's Defence Secretary John Healey in London on July 16, 2024. | Pool photo by Benjamin Cremel OUTBREAK — Europe's disease agency has warned vacationers about the risks — especially for pregnant women — of traveling to areas with high cases of a Zika-like virus after the first cases of the disease were detected in Europe. Nineteen imported cases of Oropouche virus (OROV) — a zoonotic disease which spreads to humans from infected midges and mosquitoes — were reported in European Union countries in June and July: 12 in Spain, five in Italy and two in Germany. All were linked to recent travel to Cuba and Brazil, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said in a statement. FRENCH SENSATION — "Very smart," "more open" and "impressive" are just some of the descriptions used by French diplomats, ministers and officials to describe Keir Starmer's team after Labour came back to power in the United Kingdom after 14 years of conservative rule. While the far-right riots across the U.K. may be what's on the new British prime minister's mind at the moment, the French are thinking ahead, hoping that with Labour in power, Anglo-French ties can be strengthened after years of strained relations due to Brexit. MUSK IN SCOTLAND — Elon Musk branded Humza Yousaf “super-super racist,” as he continued a feud with the former Scottish leader and capped a week of beefing with British politicians. Yousaf led Scotland as first minister between 2023 and 2024. He’s previously clashed with the X-owning billionaire — and laid into him again in recent days after Musk pushed inaccurate claims about riots that have swept Britain. Musk has meanwhile been accused by politicians of failing to tackle far-right disinformation on his platform. Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Thursday, Yousaf described the X owner as “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” because of his “amplification” of disinformation. Hitting back at Yousaf’s comments Friday, the tech entrepreneur claimed Yousaf, the Scottish-born son of first generation Pakistani immigrants, “loathes white people.” “He is super, super racist,” Musk tweeted in reply to a speech Yousaf made in 2020 about structural racism in Scotland. “Scotland gave him everything and yet he loathes white people.” MEMORIAL BOYCOTT — After Israel was not invited to Friday’s Nagasaki memorial observance, Japan’s G7 allies all boycotted the ceremony marking the 79th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city in the final days of World War II. “After comprehensively considering the matter, including the risk that an unexpected situation may arise, I made the decision to refrain from inviting the Israeli ambassador,” Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki said, according to Japanese media on Thursday. Suzuki first decided not to invite Israel in July, saying the decision was not politically motivated. He said he feared that protests against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza would overshadow the ceremony, which commemorates the victims of the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S., killing 74,000 people. The decision spurred a backlash from the six other G7 countries — the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada — and the EU. They sent a letter to Suzuki last month warning that they would not attend if Israel was not invited, CNN reported. Nightly Number €1.4 billion The cost ($1.5 billion) of cleaning up the once heavily polluted Seine River in advance of the Paris Olympics. Data from water utility Eau de Paris on Friday showed that the water quality was not safe to swim on most days during the Olympics and was of questionable quality on Monday, the day of the mixed relay triathlon. RADAR SWEEP MEET THE ‘GRANFLUENCERS’ — Social media has long existed in silos: Gen Z tends toward TikTok; millennials, Instagram; and Facebook is for the boomers. But there’s a clan who are blurring lines and defying stereotypes: call them the “granfluencers.” There’s 96-year-old Helen Elam Van Winkle, a.k.a. Baddie Winkle, whose Instagram bio reads, “Stealing yo man since 1928.” Or the Old Gays, a group of five friends in their sixties and eighties who keep up with TikTok’s dance and meme trends. The granfluencers offer an escape from the monotony of social media, writes Nicole Schmidt in The Walrus, while also portraying dimensions of aging that are helpful for both young and old alike. Parting Image On this date in 1969: The body of actress Sharon Tate is taken from her house on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif. Tate, who was eight months pregnant, and four others were found murdered by cult-leader Charles Manson and his followers. | AP Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   SUBSCRIBE TO GLOBAL PLAYBOOK: Don’t miss out on POLITICO’s Global Playbook, our newsletter taking you inside pivotal discussions at the most influential gatherings in the world. Suzanne Lynch delivers the world's elite and influential moments directly to you. Stay in the global loop. SUBSCRIBE NOW.       Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh   Follow us

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