‘Umbrella of stress’ on GM staff, 2 years after plant shut
Ex-president tries to steer donations from party to own PAC
When General Motors ended a half-century of building cars in Ohio’s blue-collar corner, 1,600 workers had to decide whether to accept the automaker’s offer to move to another factory.
Those with enough seniority retired. A few started new careers. Everyone else from GM’s shuttered assembly plant in Lordstown went as far away as Texas, Tennessee and Missouri, some leaving behind their families so they could hang onto their pensions and high-paying union jobs.
Now, two years later, many of those autoworkers are finding that their lives and futures are just as unsettled.
Worries about the fast-changing auto industry and the stability of their jobs have left hundreds still unsure whether to uproot entirely and sell their homes. Some are spending every weekend driving hundreds of miles back to Ohio to see their children. Others are holding out hope that the next contract will give them a chance for an early retirement.
No matter their situation, they all face the same question: is it worth chasing a job always seen as a sure path to the American dream?
For Tiffany Davis, she figured that by now she and her two children would be settling into a new place with her husband, Tom. That was the plan — to join him when the past school year ended — after he transferred to GM’s Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Instead, she’s been a single mom much of the past 18 months to their two children back in Ohio, where she also teaches fifth grade. Only on weekends are they all together when
Tom makes the 16-hour round trip home.
Even then, they only get one full day together that’s usually filled with catching up on household chores.
“I knew this would be difficult, but I could not have anticipated how difficult it would be. I’m worn out and exhausted,” Tiffany Davis said. “We’re always under this umbrella of stress.”
Tom Davis, 39, has been home more than expected this year because of work shutdowns caused by the pandemic and supply issues. That’s added more worries, and comes asGM is beginning a transition to making battery-powered vehicles that will need fewer workers.
Tom, who has about 11 years before he can retire, said he and his wife don’t know what will come next now that their plans to move to Kentucky are on hold.
Do they continue living apart? Do they uproot their kids? Whose job is more stable? Should he transfer to a closer plant when he’s eligible in another year?
“I still have days where I’m like, ‘Did I do the right thing?’ ” he said.
Matt Moorhead tried to stick it out.
Like so many others, the 48-year-old Moorhead didn’t want to uproot his wife from her career or their daughter from high school. And he didn’t want to walk away from a job that he was counting on to put his two children through college.
So he went by himself in the summer of 2019 to Lansing where he paid for an apartment on top of his mortgage back in Ohio. His days were spent staring at the TV and eating frozen meals “just so you could go to work.”“It was not the life I was planning on living,” he said.
After six months of traveling back and forth and “trying to be a dad through a cellphone,” his wife convinced him to quit.
They’re now getting by on savings and his wife’s job at a hospital. What happens next for Moorhead, after 24 years at GM, is still up in the air. He spent last summer managing a golf course.
WASHINGTON — It was a familiar play by Donald Trump: lashing out at his enemies and trying to raise money from it.
The former president this week escalated a standoff over the Republican Party’s financial future, blasting party leaders and urging his backers to send donations to his new political action committee — not to the institutional groups that traditionally control the GOP’s coffers.
“No more money for RINOS,” he said in a statement released Monday by his bare-bones post-presidential office, referring to Republicans In Name Only. He directed donors to his own website instead.
The move against his own party is the latest sign that Trump is trying to wrest control of the low-dollar online fundraising juggernaut he helped create, diverting it from Republican fundraising groups toward his own committee, which has virtually no restrictions on how the money can be spent.
Last week, Trump sent cease-and-desist letters — which appear to have little legal standing — to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, warning them not to appeal to donors using his name and image.
The jockeying comes as the party struggles to chart its path forward after losing the House, the Senate and the White House during Trump’s tenure, with moderate party leaders pushing the party to move beyond the divisive former president while much of the
GOP base remains behind him.
Who controls a majority of donors’ cash is set to be a contested point of dispute as Republicans try to regroup and take back power in the 2022 midterm elections.
What’s more, Trump’s advisers believe the future of party fundraising is in low-dollar contributions, not the class of major donors who have mostly signaled that they want distance from him after his monthslong push falsely claiming that the Nov. 3 election had been stolen, which led to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s maneuvering is born partly out of his anger toward Republican leaders he feels were disloyal when they edged away from him after Jan. 6.
Trump is also being encouraged by people like Dick Morris, the notorious political consultant known for flipping between the parties, who has been meeting with him in New York
and encouraging him to take on the party he once led.
Republican fundraising groups have pushed back against the former president.
In a letter Monday responding to the ceaseand-desist request by Trump’s committee, Justin Riemer, chief counsel for the RNC, stated, “The RNC, of course, has every right to refer to public figures as it engages in core, First Amendment-protected political speech, and it will continue to do so in pursuit of those common goals.”
But in a sign of the delicate dance between Trump and a Republican Party fearful of alienating its most popular figure, Riemer also said that the RNC had not and would not make fundraising appeals using Trump’s name or likeness without his approval.
On Tuesday night, Trump released a second statement walking back his earlier attacks on the Republican
committees.
“I fully support the Republican Party and important GOP Committees, but I do not support RINOs and fools, and it is not their right to use my likeness or image to raise funds,” he said. But even as he tried to clarify that he supported his party, he gave another plug for his own group.
“If you donate to our Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com, you are helping the America First movement and doing it right,” he said.
For now, aides said, Trump’s plan is to stockpile money so he can remain a force in politics and help candidates challenging dissident Republicans like Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who supported impeaching him this year.
Trump, along with the national party, raised roughly $250 million between Election Day and President Joe Biden’s inauguration. More than $60
million of that went to a new PAC. That committee and the former president’s campaign committee were both converted to linked political action committees.
Trump’s aides said this week that they had not yet started to send fundraising solicitations since he left office, but planned to do so in the coming days.
Some Republican strategists noted that less than a decade ago, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, was the biggest fundraising name in GOP politics. Now he barely recognizes his party.
The strategists played down the threat Trump poses to Republican fundraising.
“The donors that are unique to him who would be affected by that message are people who wouldn’t have donated in the first place,” said Josh Holmes, a political adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Holmes also said that as the Biden administration rolled out new policies like a nearly $2 trillion relief bill, Republicans would coalesce in opposition and develop new fundraising constituencies.
“In midterms, you raise a lot of money out of opposition to an administration and policy,” Holmes said. “In presidential years, it becomes more of a face and name of each of the parties. We’re naturally entering a different era of fundraising.”
Trump aides were split over whether the RNC should have received the threatening letter at all.
Ronna McDaniel, the group’s chairwoman, won her job in large part because of Trump’s support. Some of his aides told her that Trump had not known that she received one of the threatening letters.
There have historically been tensions between some of Trump’s advisers and RNC officials.
But in a phone call with McDaniel over the weekend to smooth over the relationship, Trump played down any intent to directly target the RNC or prevent it from reaching its donors. The takeaway from an overall pleasant conversation, people familiar with the call said, was that Trump was still supportive of Republican donors’ giving money to the RNC and that he did not plan to stand in the way.
The RNC is planning to hold part of its spring fundraising gala at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. That plan was in the works before the cease-and-desist letters.
The Four Seasons in Palm Beach, which is hosting the rest of the gala, had social distancing and space requirements that would not allow for the 350 people who wanted to attend the Saturday night reception where Trump is scheduled to speak. The hotel also expressed concerns about hosting Trump.
Gov. Larry Hogan’s biggest mistake in his decision to lift many coronavirus restrictions statewide is not so much in the details — although lifting capacity limits on restaurants and allowing people to gather indoors unmasked seems particularly risky when less than 10% of the state’s population has been fully vaccinated — but in his failure to consult or even inform local governments first.
The governor’s executive order, for the first time, specifically renders null and void existing local restrictions — made based on the particular COVID conditions within a jurisdiction — as of 5 p.m. Friday. That left leaders from Towson to Rockville scrambling after the Tuesday announcement to meet with their lawyers and health experts to decide what actions they can legally take to protect the health and safety of their residents. This is no way to run a pandemic response.
This lack of coordination with local governments — a discourteous political gotcha — and one-size-fits-all approach to reopening could carry serious consequences. If there is a lesson to be learned in this terrible year of pandemic lockdowns, mask orders, treatment confusion and vaccine rollout missteps, it’s the need for all of us to work together at all levels and make decisions based on circumstances and fact.
“State law does grant local jurisdictions some powers to take actions that are more restrictive than the state is. But my advice would be that they should follow the state guidance and get in line,” Mr. Hogan said at his Tuesday conference. That last bit — the “get in line” directive — may be all we need to know about why he cut out local leaders.
They’ve lobbed a lot of well-deserved criticism his way over the vaccine rollout, especially how it’s been failing minorities and the state’s most populous counties. This looks a lot like petty payback, and a pattern of it, at that. The governor has largely kept local governments and school systems in the dark regarding his pandemic pronouncements.
The governor made another point Tuesday worth noting:
“It’s been very confusing,” he said, “with a patchwork of different people changing rules or not being in alignment with one another.”
Perhaps we could remind him that this was his design. Back in May he essentially washed his hands of decision-making regarding the city and counties, putting the onus on them to decide whether to participate in reopening at the pace he set. At the time, he called it a “flexible and community-based approach which empowers individual county leaders.” But today it’s a confusing patchwork.
It’s telling that Governor Hogan’s acting health secretary wasn’t front and center at the announcement. Nor were leading health experts from Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. No, the governor was joined by none other than new adviser Robert R. Redfield, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Redfield is familiar to most
Americans for standing unflinchingly behind then-President Donald Trump as he spouted all sorts of nonsense about the coronavirus. That hardly bolsters the impression the governor wants us to have that science is on his side. In fact, the dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Health suggests it’s not. Boris Lushniak told The Washington Post on Tuesday that Mr. Hogan’s announcement came “about two to four weeks” early by his estimate.
The net result is uncertainty. And that’s not good. It’s not good for business owners, who can’t yet be sure what happens at 5 p.m. Friday when the governor’s order goes into effect but still could be countered by local restrictions. And it’s not good for the rest of us, who are left wondering: Is it safe to dine indoors? To attend an outdoor sporting event? To go to a local bar or theater? Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect elected officials to speak with one voice on such difficult matters, but to not even discuss it? That is unacceptable, particularly in a state like Maryland with its vast health expertise, its educated populace and an economy clearly superior to many of its peers. At least the governor left the mask mandate in place, we’ll give him a pat on the back for doing that much.
This isn’t the first time Governor Hogan has bypassed local officials, but it may be the most egregious and potentially destructive to date. Given the real dangers involved with vaccines not yet in nearly enough arms and highly contagious variants on the move, one can only hope that the cost of this too-far, too-fast relaxation of rules and loss of public health credibility won’t some day be measured in lives lost.