Is Trump’s Base Losing Patience?

The New Right risks losing its working-class alliance.

“I want to believe in conservatives’ new push to represent the working class,” my friend Luke told me near the end of a conversation several days ago. “But” he added, “I’m afraid conservatives will just do what politicians have done to working-class Americans for decades.”

And what’s that, I asked.

“Deliver a bunch of half measures, get bored with us, and royally screw us all over in the end,” he said.

This conversation was sparked after I mentioned to Luke that I would be visiting Washington D.C. at the end of this month. Luke is a licensed, skilled tradesman who works in the construction industry. He voted for Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Trump again in 2024. Our conversation was about Luke trying to discern whether he believes the Trump administration will end up delivering meaningful changes for working-class Americans.

“You and I were always told that America is the greatest place on Earth. That a good life is possible if you work hard and pursue the right things. If you’re disciplined and careful, and whatever the hell—” he stopped talking for a moment and sighed, “but it doesn’t feel that way. And I feel like all these dorks in D.C. and in corporate power can make a fuss about something and the gears of power turn to address their fussing. It doesn’t seem like those gears move the same way—or at all—for people like us. Widespread blue collar access to the American Dream just seems like a unicorn. A kind of mythological thing. But man, even saying out loud that I don’t feel like the American Dream is widely attainable for blue-collar Americans makes me feel like a bitch. And, usually, the dorks in D.C. and corporate nobility will be the first to tell us we are just bitching. That we are probably doing something stupid that is causing comfort to be hard to find. But that’s just not true.”

Luke went on to explain that the key for any political party aiming to keep consistent working-class support will be for that party to show that it knows how “the machinery” works, and show a willingness to exercise the machinery to help encourage mobility for the “forever stagnant” American working class.

“You and I didn’t go to college,” he continued. “Every adult in our lives basically told us we were going to die if we didn’t go to college. But, regardless of whatever the reasons were, I didn’t go. But I also didn’t loaf around, or party, or act like a child for an extra decade. I got to work. I got married young. Started a family. But I feel like I’m not moving.”

Luke and his wife have two children and want to have another but are overburdened by the cost of childcare. They want to move out of their starter home, but interest rates and housing costs are too high. He also mentioned that childcare costs would still inhibit a move even if housing market conditions were favorable. He and his wife would also love for her to be able to stay home with the kids, but they’ve essentially given up on that prospect. He wants to see a political party that will actually work to create an economic environment favorable to working-class mobility. He told me that was the only reason he voted for Trump in 2024. He felt Trump had what it takes to try and change the status quo.

I asked him if, ultimately, his frustrations come down to feeling like he doesn’t have the ability to make meaningful choices.

“Yes,” he said, hesitantly, continuing to tread carefully out of fear of sounding whiney or ungrateful. “I feel like being working class in our country means that you top out at a small two—or, if you’re lucky—three-bedroom ranch. You and your wife will both be working full time and you will be able to afford to have two kids. You have food to eat and TVs to watch bullshit on. But money is always tight.”

Luke isn’t unhappy with or unappreciative of what he has. He loves his life and loves his family. But he wants to give the people closest to him more opportunities and better choices. Luke worries that the current administration might be a bit naïve, or shortsighted, in their desperation to create proper market conditions for industrial growth while having no plan to address and empower the undervalued and unprepared labor force required to capitalize on that growth. “We all know about the trade deals and the tariff money that is rolling in. But what happens after that?” Luke asks. “If there’s a ‘golden age’ coming, we need political leadership to communicate their vision for working-class America. It just doesn’t seem like there is a plan for getting American workers ready for the growth that these trade deals and policy changes hope to bring about.”

I told him that I agreed, a clear plan doesn’t appear to be on the table right now. Not that I don’t think it is possible, but that I don’t think a coherent vision is being communicated to the American workforce for bridging the reality of a de-industrialized America to a future re-industrialized America. What is the plan to train and mobilize the massive workforce necessary to drastically increase American industrial capacity? What is the plan to enhance mobility, address high costs of living, and encourage family growth for working-class people? Certainly a ready-and-willing industrial workforce is something manufacturers setting up shop in America want to see. I’m not just worried about the lack of a clear vision to train the workforce we need, either. I worry that we’re struggling to even build the places we’d send that workforce to if it existed. For example, Luke and I discussed the state of chaos of the Intel plant being constructed not far from where he and I live. The project originally promised some degree of output being operational by 2025. It is now being pushed back to 2030 or 2031, maybe.

“How the hell is the state and the federal government not going bonkers over that?” Luke asked, mentioning Intel’s considerable public subsidies. The prospect of the kinds of jobs that developments like the Intel fab offer to people like Luke are incredibly powerful.

“If that project were complete, and they opened the floodgates of hiring tradesmen like me for several more dollars an hour than I make now, it would change my life. What’s the plan to get the factory’s construction timeline back on track? And will the current debacle of trying to get the facility built in Ohio discourage other manufacturers from developing here? How much wishful thinking was around the table when Intel signed that deal with our government?” Luke lamented. Politicians and bureaucrats, who may not even understand the constraints of construction or the administrative challenges of development, set loose billions of taxpayer dollars and are missing the operational mark by six years.

I told Luke that we shouldn’t despair all together in this regard. I mention that there are examples of manufacturing development via CHIPS Act pathways that are panning out—such as TSMC’s fab in Arizona that is now operational—but the Intel debacle is an important thing to observe. Just because the policy is creating the environment for manufacturing to take place in America doesn’t mean that we should expect a manufacturing renaissance to be sudden or smoothly heralded in. We will struggle to build facilities and train our workforce for a while. So we should be careful in expecting too much expediency in the delivering of Trump’s second “golden age” of manufacturing in America. That reality might leave working class folks like Luke feeling that Trump underdelivered when he promised a better seat at the table for American workers.

“’Just wait ten years and you’ll see’ was not what Trump promised on the campaign trail,” Luke said, “and look—if I am the one who ends up being strained over the next decade or two for my kids to have a more flexible, prosperous life once these changes can bear fruit, then so be it. But I am tired of politicians promising immediacy only to make us feel like gullible, over-eager fools when it doesn’t pan out.”

Luke also discussed that he is a big supporter of legislation and programs that provide real, felt opportunities to exercise choice for working families. When I asked for examples of policies that provide these felt opportunities, he brought up school choice. Programs like EdChoice here in Ohio have provided opportunities for people who would otherwise be locked out of private or good public school districts, either because of income level or zip code, to send their children to those schools if they prefer. But EdChoice is threatened by a Franklin County judge’s ruling that the program is “unconstitutional.” EdChoice will remain active in Ohio during the appeals process, but if the ruling holds it could force children back into school systems that thousands of parents don’t believe represent the best interests, culture, or desires of local families.

“EdChoice was the first piece of public policy that I felt gave my family and I some immediately enjoyable freedom,” Luke said. “I know it is more of a state thing, but it is an example of the kinds of choices the government can grant families that are a real boost to the idea that this whole thing is for us, and not against us.”

For Luke and millions of people like him, the worry is that the current administration is focused heavily on the necessary macro-level changes required to set the stage for industrial growth, but neglecting the necessary micro-level changes. Changes that would offer socioeconomic uplift to the class of people they continue to ask for further patience from and eventually hope will drive new U.S. industrial ambitions. Luke is hardly unique among working-class voters I know who are growing frustrated with what they perceive as being part of a “pimped out” voting demographic. Promised the world if they will only get themselves to the polls and vote. Most are self-aware and self-deprecating; hesitant to blame anyone but themselves. But they also want to believe that America is the place they were always told it was. A place where if you work hard, love the right things, and have a degree of frugality in your financial practices, then you will have a real shot at a good and prosperous life.

In my view, there are many policy routes the Trump administration can take to meaningfully lift up the American working class. One idea that would directly aid Americans like Luke is a cash benefit to working families such as the Family Income Supplemental Credit (or Fisc). Unlike other cash benefit programs, Fisc requires families to work in order to be eligible. It includes a tiered structure ($800 per month per child beginning at the fifth month of pregnancy, decreasing to $400 per month from birth to 6 years of age and then to $250 per month from 6 until 18), a benefit cap of no more than one-twelfth of the prior year’s total earnings, and a phase-out as the family’s income climbs. This could help someone like Luke afford childcare, save for a down payment on a home, and grow his family without worrying about destitution.

The Trump administration could also do more to address the housing crisis. Trump is already flirting with this concept by declaring a national housing emergency amid reports that the U.S. is short around 4 million homes. Median mortgage payments rose 59% between 2020 and 2023, then interest rates shot up, and now many American working-class families feel they can’t tread the economic waters of our current moment. Legislation that prevents the corporate capture of homes as “investment” properties would be a strong, and likely bipartisan, first step. Increasing tax benefits or subsidies to first-time homebuyers, temporary tariff exemptions on home building materials, and more flexible zoning regulations would help as well. Another concept Trump has touched on is releasing federal land for home development. There are many other creative routes that can be taken on the path to addressing home availability and affordability, but it remains to be seen what the Trump administration and Congress will do.

In the end, people like Luke aren’t nihilistic, angry, or unpatriotic in their complaints. They are just desperate for conditions that will allow them to participate fully in the comforts that come from achieving the American Dream through hard work and productive participation in the aims of our society and economy. If Republicans want to be the party that delivers these conditions for the working class, they need to work just as hard on addressing real, dinner table-level concerns as they are on creating market conditions that will bring industry back to American soil.