The Lincoln Logue | The Dictator Pitch, Week Two: Unions Out, JAGs In
Unions gutted, courts militarized, tariffs backfiring, and vaccines reimagined as conspiracy — all in a week’s work.
If you could pick any day of the year for Trump to cut union rights for half a million federal workers, what day would you guess? Labor Day, of course — the holiday built to honor the very rights he just shredded. By the time families were grilling hot dogs, the VA, the EPA, and half a dozen other agencies were gutting contracts under orders to treat entire workforces as “national security” operations. Trump leaned on a 1978 law written to exclude spies and code-breakers from collective bargaining — and decided it should also cover janitors at Treasury and nurses at the VA. Free lunches for cafeteria staff? Gone. Parental leave negotiated into contracts? Slashed back to the bare minimum. It’s the biggest act of union-busting in U.S. history, wrapped in MAGA gift-wrapping.
The rest of the week was more of the same: institutions bent into props. Immigration courts short on judges? Forget funding them — Trump drafted military lawyers, turning asylum hearings into live-fire exercises in cosplay justice. Meanwhile, the National Guard kept up its trash detail in D.C., armed with rifles and rakes, earning the nickname “National Gardeners.” Some soldiers joked about it; others admitted morale is tanking while they pick up litter in camo. It’s authoritarianism with a laugh track: menacing enough to intimidate, absurd enough to keep critics off-balance.
The money front wasn’t quieter. Trump’s emergency-powers tariffs just earned him a $200 billion problem, as courts hint refunds may be owed to businesses that paid duties later ruled illegal. Companies might get fat checks, consumers get nothing, and Treasury gets to borrow more to cover the mess. Add in RFK Jr., who’s turned vaccine policy into a conspiracy convention, and you’ve got the week’s perfect coda: governance swapped for theater, with real lives stuck in the middle.
Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue. Let’s get into the week that was.
Monday, September 1 — The Labor Day Massacre
▌Free lunches and parental leave = National Security Threats, Trump says.
Trump picked Labor Day — the one day meant to honor workers — to gut the rights of nearly half a million federal employees. Nurses at the VA, inspectors at the Department of Agriculture, even cafeteria staff at Treasury woke up to find their contracts voided. The legal fig leaf was a 1978 law written to keep spies and code-breakers out of unions, never the people sweeping federal buildings. Trump stretched it so far that, in his telling, janitors became covert operatives and food inspectors became counterintelligence threats. “This is literally the largest act of union busting in American history,” said Mike Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The timing made sure everyone got the point.
The changes hit like a brick. At the V.A., parental leave guarantees dropped from sixteen weeks to twelve, food service workers lost their meal allowances, and nurses lost their negotiated right to raise safety issues without retaliation. Inspectors who once had protected channels to report tainted meat or dangerous practices are now told to keep quiet or risk their jobs. Veterans’ advocates say this isn’t just bad for workers, it’s dangerous for patients who rely on an already overburdened system. In the name of “national security,” protections that made federal workplaces functional have been gutted.
The echoes go beyond government. Labor historians note that Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers in 1981 emboldened private-sector bosses for decades, and Trump’s move sends an even louder signal. If a president can declare an entire agency a security zone and shred its contracts, why can’t corporate America follow suit? Lawsuits may drag on, but culture shifts faster than courts. Trump didn’t just rip up contracts; he rewrote the rules of the game. And he did it on Labor Day, just to show that no holiday — and no union — is safe.
Source: The New York Times