CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins—who Donald Trump effectively obliterated during a town hall three years ago—reportedly pulls a $3 million salary and last year closed on a vacation retreat in Nantucket. The purchase rankled colleagues who remain stuck in the churn of a network struggling for ratings and relevance.
It comes as no surprise that Collins and the rest of the Beltway media elite remain oblivious to the seismic significance of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order last week: a 24-hour directive to terminate most of the Department of Defense’s collective bargaining agreements.
The Trump administration isn’t just tweaking federal policy; it is executing a multi-front offensive to dismantle unions under the guise of national security, with a specific bullseye on the UAW. The effort is happening in broad daylight, but an elite press corps more aligned with the Nantucket gentry than the industrial workforce is allowing it to unfold in darkness.
Underscoring that disconnect, it took the Detroit and auto media two weeks to discover that GM had idled Mary Barra’s EV factory of the future for at least a month. Some 1,300 factory workers were put on furlough by a company that has received billions in state taxpayer grants and subsidies, and almost no one noticed.
Mobilizing Union Destruction
Trump began mobilizing his union destruction attack on March 27, 2025, when he issued Executive Order 14251, dusting off a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act and essentially declaring the concept of a protected federal worker a relic of the past.
The order grants the President the power to strip collective bargaining rights from any agency deemed critical to national security—a definition that, in this administration’s hands, is broad enough to cover two-thirds of the federal workforce. It is the ultimate Skeleton Key, designed to unlock every labor contract in D.C. and make every federal worker an at-will employee.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved quickly to please his boss. On April 9, 2026, he issued a 24-hour mandate ordering his deputies to take action to cancel their union contracts, albeit with some exceptions.
As exclusively reported by Erich Wagner in the trade publication Government Executive, Hegseth spared the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association, which both secured preliminary injunctions blocking implementation of Trump’s executive order.
Champion of Union Workers?
Federal workers don’t have the best public image, and Trump making it easier to terminate them will likely be applauded by his MAGA base. But Democrats fashion themselves as champions of union rights, and the corporate media serves as their unofficial communications arm.
The party also is fast becoming an anti-Israel bloc, with all but seven Senate Democrats recently supporting a bill promoted by Bernie Sanders to block the sale of certain weapons to Israel. Yet the corporate media has so far ignored how vehement anti-Israel sentiment at Columbia University could potentially contribute to the annihilation of the UAW, which is why the union has reportedly refused to call a strike despite the student workers it represents overwhelmingly clamoring for one.
Only the World Socialist Web Site has taken note of the labor turmoil at Columbia. WSWS reported on Thursday that the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (SWC-UAW), which covers over 3,000 student workers at Columbia University, announced that union leadership rejected its request for strike approval.
Future of the UAW
Student workers represented by the UAW at Columbia and other once-elite universities are critical to the union’s growth and survival because the U.S. automotive workforce is shrinking, and the UAW has made scant inroads with autoworkers working for foreign automakers. These students are rabidly anti-Israel and are demanding their universities boycott Israel and take other measures as part of their contract talks.
If Columbia students walk out over political demands like BDS divestment, the university’s administration can move to have the strike declared unprotected under the National Labor Relations Act. Unlike standard strikes for wages, a strike driven by political issues could allow the Trump-appointed NLRB to rule the union’s actions as an unfair labor practice.
This move would not just put the students’ jobs at risk; it would create a legal opening to strip the union of its certification entirely, arguing that the UAW has transitioned from a labor organization into a political agitator that no longer serves a mandatory collective bargaining purpose.
The UAW leadership suddenly appears as the adult in the room, but it’s a potential crisis of Fain’s own making.
Following the October 7 attacks, the UAW leadership actively encouraged and supported anti-Israel protests under the official union banner, signaling to its members that the union was a platform for global political insurgency. It is entirely understandable why student workers today don’t comprehend the risks of calling a strike for political divestment; they are simply following the radicalized roadmap Fain handed them.
The second, possibly more lethal prong of Trump’s anti-union offensive is the national security hammer. By leveraging Executive Order 14251, the Trump administration can reclassify university research—particularly STEM and defense-funded projects—as a matter of National Research Security.
Under this framework, a strike that disrupts sensitive research or pushes for boycotts of strategic allies can be framed as a threat to the country’s operational stability. Trump can then use the Hegseth model to argue that the union is an unstable presence in a secure environment, providing a pretext for an administrative decertification that effectively erases the UAW’s legal standing on campus.
Auto Industry Exposure
The Trump administration has one more avenue to nuke the UAW. General Motors and Ford are clamoring for contracts to manufacture vehicles and munitions for the U.S. military, and the Trump administration is reportedly supportive of the idea. GM’s Defense unit last month landed a contract potentially worth as much as $458 million to produce Infantry Squad Vehicles based on the Chevrolet Colorado platform.
Same underlying truck, repackaged as military hardware and sold to the government at prices that would make CEO Mary Barra worth every penny of her $29 million compensation. If GM and Ford were to become providers of critical military hardware, the Trump administration could declare these companies critical to national security and deem the UAW a disruptive force—an argument that is not difficult to validate.
During the 2023 contract negotiations, The Detroit News obtained text messages sent by UAW communications director Jonah Furman. Furman boasted that UAW negotiators were using bargaining sessions to inflict “recurring reputational damage and operational chaos” on the Detroit 3 automakers.
“If we can keep them wounded for months, they don’t know what to do,” Furman said.
Furman’s background speaks volumes. He served as Bernie Sanders’ national labor organizer and a political organizer for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He also was co-chair of the Metro D.C. arm of the Democratic Socialists of America Labor Working Group, an organization which stood in “unwavering solidarity” with pro-Palestinian encampments and “their righteous message.”
Glass Houses
Fain is fond of labeling Trump a fascist, but a look at some of the reports from federal monitor Neil Barofsky serves as a reminder why people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Barofsky’s investigation into the UAW’s top ranks revealed a “culture of fear” so pervasive that half of the union’s staff admitted they were afraid to report misconduct for fear of retaliation. This is the same leadership team that reportedly threatened to “slit the throats” of internal rivals and celebrated the retaliatory ouster of Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock as if they “epically dunked” a basketball opponent—a phrase used by Fain’s chief of staff in private texts exposed by the monitor.
Mock, a hero in this saga, repeatedly objected to approving ambiguous spending requests intended to benefit the President’s Office, including benefits for Fain’s fiancée. Furman was demoted, and Chief of Staff Chris Brooks was forced to resign last December after Barofsky exposed their scheme to sideline Mock—a move the monitor documented as a “retaliatory culture” that defines Fain’s tenure.
Defending Worker Rights
Frankly, I couldn’t care less if Trump vanquished the UAW, as I don’t regard the union as an effective champion of automotive workers, and its anti-Israel student workers deserve the fate that awaits them if they pursue their political agenda as part of their contract talks.
But I do care about the rights of American workers to organize, particularly nurses and other healthcare workers whose contract agendas typically include safer patient conditions and wages commensurate with their experience and responsibilities. While the UAW may be a stain on organized labor, its anti-Israel and other political agendas may irreparably harm the rights of other workers with legitimate grievances to form unions and call strikes.
Growing wealth disparity in America is a national security risk, and left unchecked, the election of Zohran Mamdani and others with their simplistic “tax the rich” solutions will become the norm.
The first union to endorse Mamdani? That would be the UAW.