That awkward moment when your anti-union, dark money, Astroturf fake labor "movement" is literally just one Trump minion, and that guy is too cheap to even hire fake workers.
https://theintercept.com/2024/08/07/trump-league-american-workers-steve-cortes/
The “League of American Workers” Consists of One Guy: A Former Trump Spokesperson
"The League of American Workers is a “populist right, pro-worker organization,” according to its founder, Steve Cortes, a longtime conservative pundit and former Donald Trump spokesperson. The group’s website claims Cortes is leading “a young and growing movement of pro-worker patriotic populism.”
There’s certainly plenty of room to grow, The Intercept found. By all indications, this “league” is a one-man show without apparent ties to the “disregarded American workers” Cortes claims to represent. Instead, the League of American Workers has links to GOP dark money and a network of conservative websites dressed up to look like local news outlets."
Unless you spend a lot of time watching pro-Republican right wing media, there's a pretty good chance you've never heard of the League of American Workers, and if you've heard of Cortes, it's probably in the context of being a completely nondescript disingenuous talking head working to push pro-Trump, pro-DeSantis, and anti-union talking points in the media. When I first came across the name of this phantom organization, I naturally assumed it was a fascist Astroturf operation, but I had no idea just how absolutely fictitious it would turn out to be. Even by the standards of a dark money political propaganda op publishing fake articles in GOP-aligned fake newspapers, Cortes's effort here is remarkably half-assed and seems to be based entirely on the idea that if guys like Steve Bannon and Newsmax hosts simply say the words "League of American Workers" and "union corruption" enough times, labor class voters will simply assume it's a real organization representing their interests and... vote Trump, I guess?
Despite the absurd nature of this operation however, Cortes and "the League" have some interesting ties to various Republican politicians and pro-GOP dark money/Astroturf/pink slime media operations; including Metric Media, a known propaganda shop that publishes online articles while pretending to be a vast network of "local" news outlets, David Langdon, a semi-infamous conservative lawyer who specializes in dark money operations, and WinRed, a right wing online funding platform. As for Cortes himself, far from being a worker's representative he's a former Hedge Fund manager, Newsmax contributor, and worked on Trump's 2016 and 2020 campaign teams. The cherry on top of the shitcake here is that "the League" is also listed on the advisory board for Project 2025
While I strongly question precisely how many "workers" this Astroturf operation is actually reaching, it's certainly well-funded and Cortes has managed to get polls commissioned by his fake "populist right, pro-worker organization" mentioned on sites like FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, and The Hill - which says a lot about how much effort those outlets actually put into vetting their sources of information, if nothing else. Otherwise, I think it's fair to categorize Steve Cortes and "The League of American Workers" as yet another example of Republican pro-labor cosplay akin to inviting Teamster's President Sean O'Brien to the RNC, or having Josh Hawley walk a picket line in Missouri; with the obvious caveat that at least the O'Brien and Hawley stunts involved actual workers in some way or another.
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