The One Trump Pick Democrats Actually Like

Democrats spent more than $20 million last year to end then-Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s congressional career. Now, however, the Republican they worked so hard to defeat is their favorite nominee for President-Elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Trump’s selection of Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary came as a pleasant surprise to many Democrats and union leaders, who expected him to follow past Republican presidents and name a conservative hostile to organized labor. But Chavez-DeRemer endeared herself to unions during her two years in Congress. A former mayor of an Oregon suburb who narrowly won her seat in 2022, she was one of just three House Republicans to co-sponsor the labor movement’s top legislative priority: a bill known as the PRO Act, which would make unionizing easier and expand labor protections for union members.

After Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination was announced, two senior Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Patty Murray of Washington State, issued cautiously optimistic statements about her—a rare sentiment for Democrats to express about any Trump nominee. In addition, Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president who spoke at last year’s Republican National Convention and whose union stayed neutral in the presidential race after repeatedly backing Democratic nominees, has championed Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination. And it has given more progressive union leaders hope that, after winning the largest vote share from union households of any Republican in 40 years, Trump might change how his party treats the labor movement.

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“It’s a positive move for those of us who represent workers and who want workers to have a better life,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a close ally of Democratic Party leaders, told me. She noted that Chavez-DeRemer bucked her party not only by supporting the PRO Act but also by voting against private-school vouchers and cuts to public-education funding.

Trump courted union members throughout his campaign, seeing them as a key part of a blue-collar base that helped him flip states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden won in 2020. In September, his running mate, J. D. Vance, told reporters that the drop in private-sector union membership in recent decades was “a tragedy”—a statement sharply at odds with the GOP’s long-running advocacy of laws that would make unionizing harder, including in Vance’s home state of Ohio. O’Brien and congressional Republicans reportedly pushed for Trump to pick Chavez-DeRemer after the election. The decision may have been a reward for the Teamsters’ snub of Kamala Harris.

Yet until his selection of Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s support for unions had stopped at rhetoric. He’s surrounded himself with conservative billionaires and generally sided with business interests by opposing minimum-wage increases, enhanced overtime pay, and other policies backed by organized labor. With that record in mind, Democrats have added qualifiers to their embrace of Chavez-DeRemer. “If Chavez-DeRemer commits as labor secretary to strengthen labor unions and promote worker power,” Warren said in her statement, “she’s a strong candidate for the job.”

That remains a big if. A spokesperson for the Trump transition, Aly Beley, told me that Chavez-DeRemer no longer supports the PRO Act—a major shift that will disappoint Democrats but might help her secure the GOP support she needs to win confirmation. “President Trump and his intended nominee for secretary of labor agree that the PRO Act is unworkable,” Beley said.

For the same reasons that Democrats like Chavez-DeRemer, conservatives are concerned and have pushed her to renounce her pro-union stances before Republicans agree to vote for her. “This is the one that stands out like a sore thumb,” Grover Norquist, the conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, told me of her nomination. Her support for the PRO Act, Norquist said, reflected “very bad judgment.” An anti-union group, the National Right to Work Committee, wrote in a letter to Trump before he announced Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination that she “should have no place” in his administration: “She would not be out of place in the Biden-Harris Department of Labor, which completely sold out to Big Labor from the start.”

In the Senate, Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is not moving nearly as quickly as those of other Trump picks. The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), which oversees the Labor Department, has not scheduled her confirmation hearing. (Republicans have prioritized hearings for Trump’s national-security nominees.) And she hasn’t met with the committee’s chair, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who issued a noncommittal statement after her nomination was announced. “I will need to get a better understanding of her support for Democrat legislation in Congress that would strip Louisiana’s ability to be a right to work state, and if that will be her position going forward,” Cassidy posted on X. Rand Paul, who also serves on the committee and is the leading sponsor of major anti-union legislation, has said little publicly about Chavez-DeRemer—and didn’t respond to a request for comment—but his chief strategist replied to the post, urging Cassidy to “stop her.” (Cassidy has been similarly lukewarm about another nominee within the committee’s jurisdiction: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary.)

Chavez-DeRemer added her name to the PRO Act only a few months before last year’s election. Norquist speculated that she did so to appease unions in her district in the hopes of keeping her seat. If that was her strategy, it failed: Chavez-DeRemer lost to Democrat Janelle Bynum after one of the most expensive campaigns in the country.

Other Republicans see Chavez-DeRemer’s pro-labor stances as sincere, not strategic. A former colleague of hers, Representative Cliff Bentz of Oregon, praised her nomination and said that Trump had picked her for the Labor Department not in spite of her close ties to unions but because of them. “The fact that President-Elect Trump reached out to labor shows that he understands the need to create a better relationship between labor on the one hand and Republican folks on the other,” he told me. “And he saw in Lori exactly what he is trying to do.” Bentz said he would be surprised if Chavez-DeRemer “walks much of anything back.”

But Chavez-DeRemer wouldn’t be the first Trump Cabinet nominee to disavow a past position in order to win over Republican skeptics in the Senate. Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for director of national intelligence, reversed her opposition to a key surveillance tool known as FISA Section 702, which was enacted after the September 11 terrorist attacks. And Kennedy is reportedly softening his long-standing attacks on vaccines in meetings with GOP senators.

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If Chavez-DeRemer turns against the PRO Act, Democrats and unions will surely cool on her, but they won’t be shocked. Union leaders told me that they were under no illusions that Republicans would completely retract their hostility toward the labor movement, even if her nomination represented a move in that direction. “We have seen Project 2025,” Jody Calemine, the director of advocacy for the AFL-CIO, said. “That agenda is anti-worker to its very core.”

How much influence Chavez-DeRemer would have in an administration populated by corporate leaders is unclear. The PRO Act, for example, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress even with a supportive labor secretary, and Norquist expects that the White House will exert tight control over policies enacted by Cabinet leaders, as it has during recent administrations of both parties.

To progressives, Chavez-DeRemer is clearly preferable to some of the other names Trump reportedly considered for labor secretary. Most notably, these include Andrew Puzder, the fast-food CEO whose nomination in 2017 collapsed amid ethical conflicts, revelations that he employed an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper, and reports of labor-law violations at his company’s restaurants. She is also seen as friendlier to unions than either of Trump’s labor secretaries during his first term, Alexander Acosta and Eugene Scalia.

Chavez-DeRemer might be the best nominee Democrats can get under Trump. But labor leaders such as Weingarten will be watching closely to see how she squares her recent support for union-friendly legislation with an administration that is, in other key positions, empowering business leaders and billionaires. “This is where the rubber hits the road about whether the parties stay in their own preexisting camps” with regard to labor, Weingarten told me. She said she would lobby Democratic senators to support Chavez-DeRemer if the nominee sticks by her pro-union positions. But if she renounces them, Weingarten said, “then all bets are off.”