Republicans in Congress and in the rank-and-file have followed their Golden Boy as if they were his pets and not an independent party of free-thinking citizens and a glimpse of their thinking is wrapped in the latest outrage against those who work for wages, who happen to be a super-majority of Americans.

In late January, Donald Trump quietly issued a memo authorizing the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, the power to eliminate the right of federal workers to collectively bargain their wages, benefits, and working conditions. This is the kind of thing that Republicans have salivated over during most of the last century. Now, they have a president who is more than willing to destroy the rights of citizens to organize themselves to defend their working lives and the lives of their communities. In other words, he has taken the first step to strip some 750,000 workers of their citizenship rights under federal law.

If Esper takes up Trump and carries out the intent of his presidential memo, which he is expected to do, it will constitute the first bald-faced assault on the rights of unionized workers in the Department of Defense, and it will signal the opening barrage against all working people in most aspects of their lives. This is from the president who, during his campaign for the office, declared that American workers were paid too much and could not compete with the low-wage workers in dozens of other countries. Corporate America in recent decades has sent much of U.S. manufacturing to those countries and left millions of highly-skilled American workers unemployed or earning a third or a quarter of what they were paid in manufacturing.

Trump would not understand what emptying the country of the best-paying jobs means to those who are trying to raise families and care for their children into their college years. That is mainly because he doesn't give a thought to the masses of people who are struggling to survive in a Trump economy. He doesn't know, nor does he care about the millions of families who are living at poverty's door and he never thinks about their anguish over their inability to provide health care without the benefit of insurance of any kind.

As the U.S. stumbles along, some 27.5 million people, 8.5 percent of the population, went without health insurance in 2018, according to an Associated Press report last fall. That was an increase of 1.9 million uninsured people, or 0.5 percentage points, the AP reported. Trump has not made much of the apparent suffering of those millions and he doesn't intend to address the problem. In fact, he has cut the social welfare programs that are intended to help the poorest among us to stay healthy: food stamps (though it is a thin gruel to begin with) will be harder to get for 90 percent of recipients and cut them altogether for about 4 million (including disabled and elderly), his proposed budget for next year would support rescinding Obamacare without anything to replace it, among other drastic cuts, such as cutting funding to operate, maintain, and repair public housing by 60 percent . His proposal also would, unbelieveably, cut the heating assistance program altogether. Not only does the U.S. president want people, young and old, to go to bed hungry, he wants them to be cold or freeze to death in place.

Another aspect of Trump for which Republicans love their president is that he is demanding a nonsensical work requirement for those who would apply for the meager assistance, in an economy in which there are few jobs that pay a living wage. Republicans at both the state and federal level long have wanted to punish poor people and workers (often the same people) for asking for assistance. They have never looked at the work requirement as a hand up, but have generally wanted to punish them by making the application process so onerous that they would give up, as so many have.

The GOP and Trump have followed the rising stock market with awe and use it as a measure of how the “economy” is doing. They need to talk to the tens of millions who are just getting by. Meanwhile, the president is taking care of his peers, the 1 percent, by proposing another tax cut, ignoring what the last tax cut for the rich did to the people. If you pay attention to the rich and Corporate America and the money they have managed to squirrel away for themselves, you might not notice the cries of the poor. Trump's attitude and his GOP remind one of Ebenezer Scrooge and his question to his shivering clerk, Bob Cratchit, who had the temerity to mention the poor to Scrooge at Christmas time, “Are there no workhouses?” Scrooge wanted Cratchit (father of a disabled boy) to know that his job was indeed a step up from the slave-like conditions of the workhouses of 19th Century England.

In like manner, Trump wants American workers to know that they, too, are a step up from the wage-slave conditions of other countries. In fact, a step up from slave-like conditions in parts of the U.S. today, which, try as they might, unions and other worker organizations are trying to eliminate, but can't seem to finish off. There's just too much money to be made by forced labor and de facto slavery.

The connection between what Trump is trying to accomplish by eliminating federal unions and the current coronavirus threat is clear to many observers. Unions have negotiated their own health insurance benefits over decades and therefore have provided their own protection against the threat of a pandemic. That protection may not be complete, but it is substantial. If a union worker with health benefits gets sick, there is no hesitation to go to a doctor or hospital. Those without health insurance of any kind will hesitate to see a doctor and, worse, they will go to work sick, because they don't have the paid sick leave that is negotiated by most unions in their contracts. The new virus is not going to skip entrance to the U.S. and it is one of the best arguments for Medicare for All (H.R.676): No one should avoid a trip to the doctor, when it is needed and no one should go to work sick. This is not only good for those who might contract coronavirus, but is good for the public health in general.

As he moves along, destroying American institutions (think the judiciary, the Congress, the free press under the First Amendment, public education, environmental protection laws and regulations), Trump is moving to destroy the institution of organized labor, an institution that by federal law, allows average citizens, workers, to join together to secure the general welfare, as the founders urged in writing the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Rather, the current occupant of the White House is not interested in the general welfare. He is constantly on the lookout for No. 1, himself, and, to a lesser extent to those he sees as his peers, the 1 percent.

To those who think that they don't have to worry about Trump's little memo, because they aren't federal workers, think again. If you ever want to be able to stand up on your two feet and represent yourself and the rest of the working class, think about his destruction of the norms that have accrued to American workers over more than a century, during which the right to organize was earned by the workers themselves, through shedding of their blood, sweat, and tears. Equality and equity for the working class will come only through unity and solidarity of the masses. Join the union.