Another Trump Casualty Immigration foes and unions take down Labor nominee Andy Puzder.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-trump-casualty-1487204215
Andy Puzder withdrew his nomination for Labor Secretary Wednesday after a ferocious union and media assault, and is President Trump paying attention? This is what happens, sir, when a White House starts losing, losing, losing.
Mr. Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, was a rare business executive willing publicly to support Mr. Trump during the campaign. As an expert in labor management, he was ideal to reform a Labor Department that was run for eight years as a wholly owned subsidiary of the AFL-CIO. He would also have been a much-needed advocate for free markets in Mr. Trump’s senior economic councils.
Mr. Puzder’s reward was to get caught in a cross-fire between the union left and the anti-immigration right. Unions rolled out a misinformation campaign broadcasting worker grievances at his Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants, though the number and nature were politically concocted and his corporate stores are business models.
Mr. Puzder was also targeted by some on the right because he supported more legal immigration to meet the needs of a growing U.S. economy, which is a mortal sin on the restrictionist right. Mr. Puzder had once employed a housekeeper he didn’t know was undocumented, and though he fired her and paid back taxes, restrictionists wanted to punish him for supporting immigration reform. Heaven forfend he’d help farmers address their severe labor shortage. Did White House aides Stephen Bannon or Stephen Miller give the word to Breitbart and other Trumpian news outlets that they could unload on Mr. Puzder?
Certainly the White House did little to defend the businessman. His small nomination team had to rebut the false charges more or less on their own. While outside groups spent millions of dollars to bolster nominees Scott Pruitt,Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos, almost nothing was spent to help Mr. Puzder.
The White House should be especially concerned that Republican Senators dumped Mr. Puzder so easily. As many as a dozen were worried about the left-right assaults and asked the White House to spare them from a vote to confirm by withdrawing the nomination. So much for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise that all Trump nominees would make it. This is what happens when Republicans begin to feel they must distance themselves from an unpopular President.
The White House will compound its mistakes if it responds by trying to appease the union left or restrictionist right with its next nominee. Mr. Trump needs a Labor secretary who can help workers prosper in a competitive world, not treat labor economics as a zero-sum game of political redistribution.
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