It was a very lefty kind of speech. He talked about “corporate vultures” ruining the US and demanding change.
UPDATE: Text of speech in block of this realclearpolitics article, but the video (below) is better.
PBS piece with video: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-teamsters-president-sean-obrien-speaks-at-republican-national-convention
From the article and speech:
“Remember, elites have no party. Elites have no nation,” he said. “Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.”
He added: “The Teamsters are not interested if you have a D, R or an I next to your name. We want to know one thing: What are you doing to help American workers?”
“Never forget, American workers own this nation. We are not renters. We are not tenants. Wut the corporate elite treat us like squatters, and that is a crime. We’ve got to fix it,” he said.
see also: https://www.axios.com/2024/07/16/teamsters-sean-obrien-trump-rnc-speech
Yours is a thoughtful and well reasoned take. I didn’t think it was trying to soften anyone. I thought it was making a call for more workers to unionize with a list of corporate horrors as the thing to unite against. That said, I do agree that having that message set in the RNC may be a permission structure for moderates. Moreover, I’m certain they let O’Brien speak as a means of wooing low-info voters, but I’m not sure how that’d work since those people aren’t going to hear any of it.
It’s fair that maybe he felt like he could still insert a pro-labour message in the minds of working class Republican voters who were tuned in, but it’s confounding for him to not call out Trump who is representative of the exploitative capitalists he was talking about. That’s the silent endorsement to me, making it seem like the two are not completely at odds.
“This face eating leopard is good! It’s those other face eating leopards you should be worried about…”