Just days after Vice President Kamala Harris met with the leaders of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to appeal for their endorsement, one that almost always goes blue, the union told her to kick rocks, declining to endorse either her or Donald Trump.

My great-grandfather was a Teamsters boss in Philadelphia in the mid 20th century who ran against Jimmy Hoffa for the national presidency of the union. I once asked him just how corrupt and mobbed-up the legendary Hoffa was, but Pop would never say a word against him. In his brogue, he would simply say, ‘Jimmy was a friend of da workin’ man.’

Decades later, the leadership and 1.5 million members of the Teamsters, along with 500,000 retirees, had to decide this week whether Trump or Harris is the friend of the working man in the 2024 race. 

In this stunning move, and direct snub to Harris, the union decided not to endorse or put its significant resources behind either candidate, and the reason why is very obviously pressure from its membership.

‘I voted for Biden,’ a retired longtime Teamster told me in Washington, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh. ‘But you want facts? Let’s give grocery facts, let’s give electricity facts, let’s give gas facts, let’s give every fact between when he was elected and now.’

For him, the facts added up to a vote for Donald Trump.

And he is not alone.

The results of the Teamsters own internal survey were staggering. Back in July, President Joe Biden, (remember him?) was leading Donald Trump 44-36 percent. Fast forward to today and Trump has surged to a 60-34 lead over Harris in the online survey and 58-31 over the phone lines.

This is a massive shift, more dramatic than we have seen within any other substantial demographic. Cutting off Joe Biden’s ancient roots in the labor movement has left members a clearer choice between Harris and Trump, and it’s bad news for the Veep.

It’s also bad news for many in the Teamsters leadership who bristled when union president Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention, as did the left-aligned labor movement in general.

In San Francisco, I met Ray, a Teamster in the hospitality industry, proudly displaying his lapel pin, but he was also frustrated by the national leadership.

‘They don’t seem focused on guys like us,’ he told me. ‘Like they are playing a whole different ball game.’

In general, my conversations with union members across the country this election cycle have differed dramatically, depending on whether it was a private sector union, like the Teamsters, or a public sector union, such as teachers unions.

Private sector members talk more about balancing their needs with the ability of their industries, which they know well, to prosper. Public sector union members seem to expect that the government has endless money and can always go find a Leprechaun and take its pot of gold.

If this huge tidal wave of Teamster votes to Trump is reflected in other unions such as the United Auto Workers Union, or service sector unions, and from the working people I’ve spoken to, and I suspect it is, the electoral implications could be profound. 

As with many Americans, there may be many things that many Teamsters don’t love about Trump. That would explain why Joe Biden, who accurately or not, is seen as a more traditional Democrat than Harris, appealed to them.

But without Biden’s big labor patina and history, it seems most Teamsters have decided that it is time for them to move on from the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris, toward Trump’s promise to make America, and its wages, great again.

Just like Pop so long ago with Jimmy Hoffa, more and more Teamsters today are looking at Trump. They may think he’s imperfect, they may think he’s rough around the edges. But increasingly, they also see him as the race’s only friend of the working man. 

In an effort to ‘sow discord and shape the outcome of U.S. elections’, Iranian cyber actors sent messages during the summer to people involved in President Biden’s then re-election campaign containing stolen material from former President Trump’s campaign, U.S. agencies said.

‘Iranian malicious cyber actors in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,’ the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement on Wednesday. 

The agencies noted that there is currently no information indicating if recipients replied to the messages.

The U.S. intelligence agencies also alleged that Iran has continued their election interference since June and has sent stolen Trump campaign material to U.S. media organizations.

‘Furthermore, Iranian malicious cyber actors have continued their efforts since June to send stolen, non-public material associated with former President Trump’s campaign to U.S. media organizations,’ they said.

The agencies said that the continued election interference from Iran is to ‘stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.’

‘As the lead for threat response, the FBI has been tracking this activity, has been in contact with the victims, and will continue to investigate and gather information in order to pursue and disrupt the threat actors responsible,’ they said. ‘Foreign actors are increasing their election influence activities as we approach November.’

Iran is not the only foreign adversary accused of meddling with the 2024 presidential election. On July 10, ODNI officials called Russia the ‘preeminent threat’ to the election.

This column began as a post on X/Twitter, one which resonated with the audience. Here is the revised and extended version of why former President Donald Trump should win your vote. 
 
Voting has begun in Pennsylvania, perhaps the single most crucial state in this election. 
 
Voting for president will accelerate on Saturday when Virginia opens its doors to early, in-person voting. Trump took to X on Tuesday, September 17, to urge Pennsylvania voters to get out and vote early. Republicans across the country seem to have fully absorbed the necessity of voting early — it is crucial in a race this close — but only the final tally will tell if they got the message. 

 
Analyst Nate Silver’s ‘prediction of victory odds’ gave  Trump a 59.7% chance of winning the election and Vice President Kamala Harris a 40% chance of winning on Tuesday morning, a week after the debate. (Note: Silver’s analysis is not a poll, but rather the widely respected Silver’s assessment of the odds of winning based on all the state polls and other crucial data.) 

Polls taken after the debate but before the second assassination attempt on Trump have Harris slightly ahead nationally but very much within the margin of error. Most analysts say she got a small bump from the debate but it is margin-of-error stuff at best and may be changing as she stumbles through the aftermath. (Her appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists was a fiasco for her if anyone sees it. She remains a jukebox with very few choices among her answers, all of them bad. A 7% cap on the cost of childcare?) The race is a frozen, jump ball of a race, with each candidate possessing a good chance of winning. 
 
The takeaway from all this, and what I emphasized in my opening monologue on Tuesday, is that ‘the choice,’ voters must make is underway is upon them even as it is very much being debated across the country. 
 
That ‘choice’ is between Trump/Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s national security team, and his 3,000 other political appointees and Harris/ Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her national security team and her 3,000 other appointees. 
 
At the end of his first term, Trump had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and many more who are expected to return in a second Trump term in some role. Harris’s national security choices are almost a complete unknown save for Philip Gordon, her current National Security Advisor (a very unsettling prospect according to people who I know who know his record.) 

A key consideration for voters should be the national security team Trump or Harris will bring with them, along with the 3,000 appointees they will also place in every agency of the vast federal government beginning in late January. 
 
Trump’s appointees will be center-right to conservative men and women and Harris’s appointees are almost wholly unknown but, in many if not most cases, will be out-and-out radicals, far to the left of the mainstream. That’s the San Francisco way. That’s why San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley are in such ruins. They are all run by extreme ‘progressives,’ which really means radicals. 
 
Each candidate would also get to nominate judges and perhaps a Supreme Court justice or two, though there are no vacancies on the highest court now as there was when America voted in 2016. 
 
Trump’s and Harris’s views on judges as well as every other big issue are so completely different –on the need for a defense buildup, for the continuation of the 2017 tax cuts (they expire in 2025 if not extended and Trump wants to extend them and Harris does not), of whom our most deadly enemies are and how to deter them, on how to close the border (Harris simply won’t), on energy production including fracking, on Israel and its right to strike at its enemies, on the nature and specific threats posed by our enemies in China, Iran and Russia — that the choice should be very easy. Mine was. It is Donald Trump. I hope yours is too and that you forward this column to everyone you know. 

My choice to vote for Trump is driven by my faith in the Constitution and deep unwillingness to amend it, explicitly or via expansion and packing the Supreme Court by congressional legislation about the number of justices. Amendments to the Constitution’s provisions about the Supreme Court or underhanded laws expanding the number of justices, which has been fixed at nine since shortly after the Civil War, would mark the beginning of the rapid end of the rule of law in the country.  

Harris is pledged to radically changing the court. Trump is opposed to court-packing. That imperils the most important general feature of the Constitution — separation of powers — as well as the First Amendment specifically, the right to free speech and especially the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. This should matter to every person of faith, no matter their religious views or no views at all. 
 
My choice is also driven by knowledge — first-hand, personal knowledge gained while serving in the executive branch from 1984 to 1989, and by experience gained since 1989 when I left the Beltway for California to become a journalist, lawyer for clients needing land use permits from the federal government and a law professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law.  
 
My years as a young lawyer fresh off a clerkship with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, began as a member of the Reagan administration in 1984. The jobs 40 years ago showed me how the federal government actually runs. I worked as a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office, for two attorneys general at the Department of Justice, and at the Office of Personnel Management.

I went through the ‘advice and consent’ process in the Senate and helped run OPM first as its general counsel, then as it’s confirmed deputy director and finally as it’s acting director at the close of the Reagan administration. From 1984 to early 1989, I had the highest security clearance level available — TS-SCI (though I was not read into every compartment of ‘Specialized Compartmented Information’ because my work was on counterintelligence matters and domestic security issues, not overseas surveillance and operations.) 
 
Five of my seven jobs from those years long ago were from among those 3,000 jobs that appointees of incoming presidents do not require Senate confirmation. A vast majority of the appointees of a president do not require Senate confirmation, and the policies all appointees ought to be pursuing are directed at least in theory by the president. Those are the actual results of the election. To repeat: Very few of the 3,000 are confirmed by the Senate to an ‘Executive Level’ position. (I held two of those.) 
 
If a voter grasps how many people leave and arrive with a change of presidents, they should approach the choice in November with that legion of appointees in mind. Harris’s appointees will be far, far to the left of the American mainstream. Trump’s are a jumble of what used to be called ‘Rockefeller Republicans’ and ‘Goldwater Republicans.’  

Trump is the least ideological president since Richard Nixon, period. He innovated on the domestic level — setting up the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and staffing his White House within all comers from all camps, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Henry Kissinger to George Schultz and Donald Rumsfeld. Trump’s few critics in the GOP — a list of 200 people out of tens of thousands who served GOP presidents have endorsed Harris are mostly opposed to Trump and not to his policies.  

Such lists of endorsements are neither significant nor influential because most voters do not care about endorsements, whether it is 20, 200 or 2,000. They want to know whether the candidates and their policies and appointees will impact them and their children and grandchildren and the quality of their lives, particularly the economy and their personal security. 
 
On security, our enemies fear Trump and cannot possibly fear Harris, who simply lacks the minimum skills to be president, much less restore American defenses and deterrence. 
 
Harris won’t. She is afraid of interviews! How could our most serious enemies fear her if she fears the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the major networks? 
 
Understand what that means: She has given two interviews in the two months since she became the selected nominee of the Democrats, and both were disasters even though neither CNN’s Dana Bash nor Philly TV journalist Brian Taff pushed her hard or posed any follow-ups, much less pointed ones on her non-responsive answers to their questions.  

She’s become a parody of herself, a jukebox with a half dozen bad choices of answers, none of them responsive to the direct questions asked her. Again and again, she refuses to answer questions. It is probably because she lacks the knowledge to do so. 
 
In the one debate Trump and Harris held, neither ABC/Disney’s duo of David Muir and Linsey Davis, primed to ‘fact check’ Trump, said a word about Harris’s startling, indeed disqualifying, answer that no American troops were in combat zones. (Either she doesn’t know or she just wanted to lie to get a talking point out there — either way it should be disqualifying for anyone who aspires to be commander-in-chief.)  

There was not one question in that debate about the People’s Republic of China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, repression of Hong Kong, threatening Taiwan and the Philippines, its spying in the U.S. or its influence campaign on TikTok. (This void may have been imposed on Muir and Davis because of Disney’s vast business interests in Communist China including two theme parks). That debate should be forever embarrassing to ABC/Disney and the moderators.  

It is as though a debate in 1940 between FDR and Wendell Wilkie did not feature a question about Imperial Japan. The good news is that this ambush of Trump did not significantly halt his momentum but may have done so to Harris because of the troops-in-combat zone and the attention it brought to Springfield, Ohio, and other communities staggering under sudden, massive influx of migrants who have been granted protected status by President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris. 

The election is very close, and it should not be. There are many people, people whom I respect greatly, who have been so unsettled by the aesthetic that the former president brings with him that they won’t vote for him. I can’t change their minds, and some of those minds have been closed to Trump since 2015 and some since January 6, 2021. They simply cannot get past their last issues with Trump, even though some of them surely know Harris lacks the very minimum skills needed to be president. 
 
Their sunk costs cannot be unburdened from themselves, but the vast, vast majority of voters are not frozen in time or particular enmity toward either candidate. Thus, for the next 45 days, I am going to devote every hour on air and every appearance on other programs and every column I write to making the case for Trump. It is a very easy case to make. 

 
I believe the future of my grandchildren depends greatly on this election. The CCP led by Xi Jinping is a mortal threat to every American. Our ally Israel needs every assistance we can provide to it to defeat Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Iran is very close to obtaining but must not get a nuclear weapon. 

I fear Harris on all counts far more than I fear Trump cutting off aid to Ukraine which I do not believe will happen. The Constitution will be stressed by an influx of Harris radical judges and directly assaulted by her ‘court reform’ plan, which is really court packing. Her prosecutors will continue the weaponization of the law against political opponents and will ignore crime in the way that prosecutors in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other cities have done so. 

My choice to vote for Trump is driven by my faith in the Constitution and deep unwillingness to amend it, explicitly or via expansion and packing the Supreme Court by congressional legislation about the number of justices.

Next, ‘energy is freedom’ is one of my favorite sayings, not only because it is true — from putting gas in your car to drive to revenues to the U.S. Treasury, revenues which depend heavily on American productivity which is built on the cost of energy. The only way to really bring down prices is to bring down the cost of their production and the cost of their transportation to market.  

The U.S. must absolutely ‘drill, baby drill,’ but also throw everything at the new generation of nuclear power plants and the export of liquified natural gas. Our ‘AI’ (and super-computing) future depends on our soaring base load of energy production. China will dominate artificial intelligence and super-computing and thus the world if we do not at least keep pace with them and that means vastly more domestic energy production. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.