Why Have the Teamsters Gone Far Right?

The Teamsters leadership has in no way regretted its embrace of Donald Trump:

The Teamsters is a union as decentralized as the country. Like the median voter, most union members aren’t closely following what Teamsters President Sean O’Brien is saying. But the larger labor movement should be aware of how he’s realigning the Teamsters to a Republican Party hellbent on destroying unions. According to Politico, the Teamsters under O’Brien are donating to battleground Republicans in the upcoming midterms. Its political action committee has doled out $62,000 in contributions to dozens of Republican congressional candidates, while giving $15,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in April.

Since he spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in 2024, O’Brien has tried to cast himself as a maverick breaking with conventional politics. Even though the Teamsters have supported Republican presidents in the past, from Dwight D. Eisenhower (under anti-immigrant zealot Dave Beck, who backed “Operation Wetback” and who Ike called “Republicans’ labor statesman, or alternately, “His Majesty the Wheel”) to Ronald Reagan, there is both continuity and rupture with the past in the Trump regime. As part of these overtures to align with far-right Trumpists, O’Brien invited Vivek Ramaswamy on his podcast, and sat down with right-wing rag The Free Press for an interview with Bari Weiss, in which he criticized Senator Bernie Sanders for not returning his calls, in spite of Sanders supporting workers currently out on strike at Mauser in Chicago since June 9.

An escalating employer offensive and turbocharged deregulation push are the background against which the fight at Mauser unfolds. How to make sense of O’Brien’s full embrace of MAGA Republicans when the union and workers are taking a beating from employers testing what they can get away with while Trump is in office? As the labor movement faces one of its toughest fights for survival, O’Brien has remained among the most loyal of Trump’s union sycophants, consistently demonstrating obeisance even after the president has left little doubt about his intention to destroy the labor movement.

What do the Teamsters think they are going to get from all of this? But then that might be the wrong question. We have to first frame this by the fact that Sean O’Brien is a democratically elected union leader, a rarity in that often problematic organization. His embrace of Trump and Republicans reflects much of his membership. Why is that?

I am often on the Rick Smith Show. Rick is a Teamster and former long-haul trucker and his show is intended to counter the far-right radio that truckers listen to. He’s told me that whatever you think insane messages truckers are hearing when they drive, it’s far worse in reality than anything you can imagine. He wants to provide a union Teamster voice to counter that. Of course, one person can only do so much.

Now, truckers were not always far right figures. But right wing thinkers have been really smart in targeting groups of men that were once relatively apolitical and turning them to extremists. Another example of this is rodeo, which in the 70s was for good ol’boy fuckups who liked to drink beer and get on bulls because they are insane. It was totally apolitical and these were not church going fellows. Today? It’s evangelical country all the way. These dudes pray and talk about how Christ is guiding them and have been embraced by the right. This was an intentional project that revolved around the cowboy churches you see in the rural West and the sophisticated use of images that would connect the rural West to right-wing politics. It’s similar in trucking. Like with rodeo, trucking was a big part of 70s popular culture and these movies and TV shows were not right-wing at all. They might also be mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, but it was a small p-populism of men trying to buck a system that held them down as men and sort of as workers. You can see how they could be hijacked by right-wing media that played on this world. So what is on at 3 in the morning on AM radio when the only people on the road are truckers? Far right material that plays directly to these folks.

In short, much of this has happened without Democrats even really knowing how or why. Fox is just the tip of the iceberg. Much of this takes places in spaces that most of us have very little sense even exist. So it’s not surprising in this context that a lot of Teamsters are ingesting messaging geared precisely for their grievances.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending O’Brien or the Teamsters here. They aren’t going to get special favors from Republicans for any of this. Trump’s war on workers will hurt them as much as anyone else. But unless we have ways to counter the messaging folks hear, we are ceding the field to them and that’s going to have outsized impacts on constituencies that used to be Democratic leaning and now are very much not.

We are decades behind on this and I don’t see much evidence of people even beginning to figure out what to do about it. Yeah, there was Air America, but that wasn’t designed for truckers or working class people. It was designed for college-educated liberals. Naturally, it failed.