Trump Courted Blue-Collar Workers. Will His Policies Favor Them?

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Donald Trump picks Pam Bondi to lead the Justice Department after a botched first AG nomination. Plus Trump made big gains among blue-collar workers. We'll take a look at how his campaign trial promises might translate into policy. The Republicans, for now at least, are the party of the working class and if they want to remain the party of the working class, they might need to change some of these policy positions.

And Huawei makes strides in chip technology and threatens the iPhone in China. It's Friday, November 22nd. I'm Kate Bolivant for the Wall Street Journal, filling in for Luke Vargas. And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Donald Trump has chosen former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to run the Justice Department, just hours after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration for the role under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations. By selecting Bondi, journal reporter Sadie German says Trump has chosen a close ally who presents a more conventional choice than Gaetz. Her background experience as Florida's

former attorney general and somebody who's worked as a line prosecutor for years might make her more appealing to senators who have to confirm her. But at the same time, she is somebody who is extremely loyal to Trump and has signaled in a variety of ways that she is 100% on board with his agenda. We saw her taking more prominent role in the campaign as it neared its end, making several appearances at campaign rallies in November.

And she is somebody who's been with him, including during his first impeachment. And in fact, he was considered as a possibility for Attorney General when Trump was president the first time. Selecting Attorney General has been Trump's top personal priority.

as he looks to bring the Justice Department, which he has clashed with for years as it investigated him and his allies under close presidential control. And as Trump continues to make his cabinet picks, we're exclusively reporting that he's floated the idea of nominating financier Kevin Walsh as his Treasury Secretary.

The idea comes with the understanding that Walsh could later be nominated to lead the Federal Reserve when Jerome Powell's term ends in 2026. The President-elect is also thinking about appointing investor Scott Besant to lead the National Economic Council with an eye toward nominating him as Treasury Secretary later if Walsh becomes Fed Chair. Walsh, whom Trump had considered to lead the Fed during his first term, has previously spoken out against protectionist trade policies.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Trump asked Walsh about his past stance on tariffs during a meeting this week. Representatives for Bessent, Walsh and Trump's transition team didn't respond to requests for comment.

The Biden administration plans to add 29 Chinese companies to a trade blacklist today over their alleged links to forced labour in the country's Xinjiang region. It's the largest ever expansion of the so-called entity list that took effect in 2022, bringing the number of companies on it to more than 100. Most of the newly banned companies are in the agricultural sector

though some come from other industries, including mining and smelting. China has denied accusations of human rights abuses and has said the US law interferes in its internal affairs. And despite American sanctions, China's Huawei continues to advance its semiconductor technology.

According to our reporting, the company has set to roll out its most advanced domestically-made phone chip to date when a new series of devices goes on sale next week. Huawei hasn't given details of the phone's features or the chips inside them, an area of interest for US policymakers who have tried to hold back Huawei's technology. And Journal reporter Lisa Lin told us the new chips are also a concern for Apple, which has been losing ground in China.

Huawei had always been a big contender in China's smartphone market, but when an export control got slapped on Huawei, it was unable to procure the smartphone chips needed for cutting-edge smartphones. And because of that, there was a gap of a couple of years when it stopped releasing premium smartphones. And that meant that Apple had a lot of space to claw ahead in the Chinese smartphone market.

What happened last September was Huawei surprised the market by unveiling three smartphones with the same sort of cutting edge abilities that you see with the most advanced iPhone handsets these days. And partly due to nationalistic buying and partly due to the merits of the Huawei phone itself,

while we managed to get market share back from Apple. And in news that market watchers will have their eye on today, DirectTV has decided to walk away from its proposed merger with rival dish network. The decision came after rebuke from bondholders representing more than $10 billion of debt in dish and a subsidiary.

The tie-up, which the two satellite TV companies have attempted several times, was dependent on the creditors' approval. And the dollar is strengthening against the euro and the British pound, after disappointing purchasing managers' indexes pointed to economic weakness in Europe. US PMI surveys are due at 9.45am eastern.

Coming up, Donald Trump is called to confront a fight over Labour policy unfolding within the Republican Party. What could that mean for workers? We'll look at that after the break. TMB Tech Minute gives you the day's top tech headlines featuring newsmakers that shape the tech world and beyond, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The two things that I think will matter most over the next decade are abundant and inexpensive, intelligence and abundant and cheap energy. And if we can get these two things, then it's almost difficult to imagine how much else we could do. Check out TNB Tech Minute in the Tech News Briefing Feed from The Wall Street Journal.

Donald Trump has drawn swathes of working class voters away from Democrats, reaping the rewards of a campaign strategy in which he aggressively courted union members. Now, the journals Paul Keanen reports his incoming administration faces the question of how to reconcile that new reality with the Republican Party's traditional stance, which favors low taxes and minimal intervention and is generally hostile towards unions. Paul joins me now from Washington

Paul, you write about this self-proclaimed new right that's challenging the sort of classic GOP approach and led by J.D. Vance. Where do they stand on Labour policy?

Yeah, there's also a number of Republican senators who are aligned with Trump. So those include Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Josh Hawley, and finally Vance. All three of them co-sponsored a bill in 2023 that aimed to improve safety for railroad workers following this big train derailment in Ohio. And Marco Rubio, who's now expected to be Trump's nominee for Secretary of State back to unionization push at an Amazon.com warehouse in 2021.

And it's not exactly clear how far they want to go, how interventionist they want to be. But in general, they're less skeptical of unions than the Republican Party has traditionally been. And a lot of these Republicans who are aligned with the new riot are also kind of skeptical of big tech. Do we know what Trump's labor policies might include at this stage? And how much traction the ideas championed by this new right wing you've just described might gain?

So if our Trump has not provided a lot of detail on the labor policies that he might pursue, beyond his broader plans to restrict immigration and trade. Depending on who he picks for labor secretary, there could be other things on the menu like continuing to pursue the Biden administration's

goal of banning non-compete agreements for low-wage workers, which in recent years, it's come to light that businesses, including fast food chains, have made their low-wage employees sign no-poach agreements that eliminate their ability to go work at franchises that might pay higher wages. So that's an example of a labor policy that the US Chamber of Commerce sued to overturn, but that some of these new right figures would say, actually, that's a good idea.

sort of more narrowly, Trump has signaled that he wants to be able to fire more federal government employees. So that's something that obviously the federal employees labor union is very upset about that. And we'll fight that. You know, there's legal impediments. A lot of this stuff is going to be challenged in court and it's unclear how far it will go. But there's this famous interview with Elon Musk

before the election in which he kind of praised Elon Musk for firing workers who go on strike. There was another appearance at a rally when he said that when he was in business, he used to hate giving overtime. He'd do anything he could to avoid paying overtime. Trump's critics will tell you that that shows how he thinks about these issues. But the reality is that the Republicans for now at least are the party of the working class. And if they want to remain the party of the working class, they might need to change some of these policy positions.

Paul, remind us what Trump's approach to labor looked like during his first term. Are there any clues there? He largely stuck to the Republican Party's established positions toward labor and especially organized labor and with the exception of his immigration and trade policies. So, for instance, his labor department finalized a rule that set the salary threshold at which workers automatically become eligible for overtime pay.

lower than the level that the Obama administration had sought. And so, labor advocates complained that this would effectively make about 8 million workers ineligible for overtime under the Trump rule. And the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections and stands between

workers and companies, Trump appointed key officials who had either been lawyers for company management or kind of traditional Republican functionaries. And so labor unions complained that Trump's National Labor Relations Board was unfriendly to unions that it tended to side with management.

And union officials say that they anticipate that Trump is going to attack the working class and that it's in the words of the spokesman for the AFL-CIO. It's going to be a rude awakening for a lot of these blue collar people who wanted to take Trump as word and voted for him and thought that he was going to make their lives better. That was journal reporter Paul Keenan. Paul, thanks so much for your time. Yeah, thanks, Kate.

Well, speaking of Trump's campaign promises, we'd like to know your questions about how they might be implemented and what they mean for you. To weigh in, send us a voice memo to wn-p-o-d at wsj.com or leave a voicemail with your name and location at 212-416-4328. We might just use it on the show.

And that's it for What's News for Friday Morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach with supervising producer Christina Rocha, and I'm Kate Bullervant for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for Luke Vargas. We'll be back tonight with a new show, and until then, have a great weekend, and thanks for listening.