The answer, at least as of Chavez-DeRemer’s hearing, appears to be yes. Senate Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee are poised to send her nomination to the floor of the upper chamber, where Chavez-DeRemer will likely be confirmed with some measure of bipartisan support.

This, of course, could all go sideways. Republicans are planning to ask Chavez-DeRemer some serious questions about her intentions for the department today. GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a longtime skeptic of labor unions, will decline to move Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination out of the HELP committee. That means she’ll need votes from the Left. Sources say the labor movement is itself making a powerful case to Democratic committee members like Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin: It’s Chavez-DeRemer or someone much, much worse.

How did a Republican president’s nominee to lead the Labor Department end up receiving an assist from unions? The story of Lori Chavez-DeRemer is the story of how the GOP became MAGA. Trump’s singular, personal ideology of “America First” transactional pragmatism is the operating software of the Republican Party right now. That means different things at different moments. At this moment, even while an anti-union figure like Elon Musk slashes the federal bureaucracy, the GOP is backing the same candidate for Labor as unions themselves. With opposition to Musk quickly becoming a new cultural litmus test on the Left, Democrats are thrown by the nomination too.

Thirty-six years ago this month, a 20-year-old Lori Chavez-DeRemer started working part-time at the front desk of a Planned Parenthood clinic in California. Now in her mid-fifties, Chavez-DeRemer told NBC News: “I personally do not support abortion, and if confirmed, I would not use my position as Secretary to facilitate abortion access in Labor Department programs. My job will be to implement President Trump’s agenda.”

It’s not uncommon for moderate Republicans to disagree with the party’s platform on abortion, and her long career in politics reflects a standard record for GOP politicians on the West Coast. In a 2023 interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Chavez-DeRemer mused about her time as a suburban mayor: “For the longest time, people probably didn’t even know what my party was, because I just wanted to represent the people and the concerns that they had for things that happened in front of their noses.”

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This makes Chavez-DeRemer an interesting character. Before serving a single term in Congress, she enjoyed a long career in local politics. After marrying her “high school sweetheart”, supporting him through medical school with odd jobs, and a stint on the local parks committee, in 2004 Chavez-DeRemer joined the city council of Happy Valley, a community outside Portland, Oregon. A mother of twins, she would go on to serve as mayor of Happy Valley from 2010 to 2018.

Chavez-DeRemer took a “break” from holding office until 2022, when she flipped Oregon’s 5th Congressional District red in a razor-tight race for the seat she then lost last November following another close election. But by Thanksgiving, Trump announced he would nominate Chavez-DeRemer to serve as Labor Secretary, elevating the former mayor of Happy Valley to the executive branch.

At the time, the Washington Post reported that the pick “surprised” Beltway insiders and described the nominee as a “moderate Republican who has served on bipartisan congressional caucuses and supported pro-union legislation”. So how did she end up on Trump’s list? It’s widely understood in D.C. that Teamsters president Sean O’Brien pushed for Chavez-DeRemer after agreeing to speak at the Republican National Convention last summer, a place no labor leader in recent history would have been caught dead until Trump came along. O’Brien also declined to endorse Kamala Harris, bucking a trend.

As a New Yorker story recently observed, Chavez-DeRemer “was raised in California by a Mexican American Teamster”, adding: “Her father, Richard Chavez, who worked at a Safeway milk plant in the Central Valley, reportedly leaned on his union card to help his daughter last year, when she was seeking labor endorsements in a bid for reelection.” While she lost that race, Chavez-DeRemer became the first Republican endorsed by the local Teamsters in two decades. Why? Her support for the PRO Act, a bill strongly associated with Joe Biden and the Democrats, which would make it much easier to form a union, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would guarantee the right to organize for state employees.

These are not merely bills strongly associated with Biden and the Democrats, but also bills strongly opposed by high-profile Republicans, with the very notable exception of Josh Hawley in the case of the PRO Act. That’s why, according to Politico, anti-union groups tried to prevent Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination in the first place. That she is even up for nomination, let alone confirmation, is a major victory for Trumpism in and of itself.

Theoretically, a win for Trump on this could be a victory for the Left too, though Chavez-DeRemer only has a lifetime rating of 10% on the AFL-CIO’s scorecard that seeks to rate a politicians’ friendliness to organized labor. “Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is perhaps the best-case scenario for worker advocates and labor unions, relative to the other names in the mix, such as former fast-food CEO Andy Puzder,” Politico continued. If Democrats were to block her, then a conventional anti-union Republican would almost certainly take her place.

First, though, Chavez-DeRemer needs to be voted out of committee, a normally mundane part of the confirmation process that in this case could be imperiled by GOP Sen. Rand Paul who confirmed on Tuesday that he would vote against Chavez-DeRemer. Paul’s decision comes as no surprise. “I’m the national spokesman and lead author of the right-to-work bill,” he posted on X back in January. “Her support for the PRO Act, which would not only oppose national right to work but would preempt state law on right to work — I think it’s not a good thing.” This means Trump will need Democrats to advance his nominee out of HELP to a full floor vote: Sen. John Fetterman says he’s a yes, as does Jeff Merkley. But that won’t matter if Chavez-DeRemer gets stuck in committee.

Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the PRO Act is a big sticking point for many Republicans. According to one senior GOP House source, “she is a Leftist in moderate’s clothing”, while the president of the National Right to Work Committee warned in a New York Post op-ed: “Teamsters don’t deserve a Cabinet pick — like Labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer”. The evening before today’s hearing, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board came out swinging. “Republicans are enjoying increasing support from low-income workers, but too many think unions are the key to that support,” the paper asserted. “It isn’t.”

Several weeks ago, Paul warned that Chavez-DeRemer could lose as many as 15 Republicans if she even advances out of the committee. For decades, the conservative movement’s “fusionist” agreement against communism held libertarians, social conservatives and neoconservatives together. Labor unions were distrusted, not merely as disruptors of the free market, but as potential breeding grounds for dangerous ideological infiltration. This consensus seemed to fall apart after 2016, leading many on the Right to reconsider their reflexive rejection of organized labor.

Daniel Kishi is a policy advisor at American Compass, where conservatives interested in building out a Right-of-center lane for ordinary workers try to put ideological meat on the cultural bones of MAGA (myself included). Asked about the confirmation, he told me: “President Trump has transformed the Republican Party into the party of the working class. Selecting Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as his Labor Secretary reflects his desire to deliver on the promise of this realignment”. He added: “Senate Republicans should see this as an opportunity to cement the party’s gains with working Americans and make them a permanent part of their coalition.”

Heading into the hearing, Trump allies feel good about her odds, but nobody quite knows what the math will look like. That will depend on how Chavez-DeRemer performs today.

Republicans roughly know what to expect from Chavez-DeRemer’s realignment-friendly warmth towards organized labor. Democrats, on the other hand, now face the prospect of confirming someone who seems increasingly likely to answer to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency as he pivots to Labor, leaving any potential department head responsive to the President’s mandate for sweeping reform. Musk is a bitter opponent of unions and DOGE is already making headlines over its early moves to reform the Labor Department. Greenlighting Chavez-DeRemer’s confirmation could come back to haunt Democrats should the nominee be confirmed and start rubber-stamping attacks on organized labor from DOGE, especially if they appear to benefit Musk’s businesses.

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Democratic Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey told Semafor he had a “good conversation” with Chavez-DeRemer but seemingly referenced DOGE and said: “I’m not supporting nominees as long as the lawlessness continues.” Meanwhile, Chris Murphy of Connecticut came out strong in the same article. “I’m a hard no on her,” he explained. “And it’s not a protest vote. It’s about her character and commitment to the Constitution.”

That’s a good preview of where Democrats’ questions will go, and from where the pressures on them are coming. If, however, you’re Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from swing-state Wisconsin, voting Chavez-DeRemer out of committee — and even into office — is pretty clearly an easy opportunity to look like a common-sense Democrat who calls balls and strikes. (Baldwin ran ads highlighting her bipartisan work with Trump to win a close reelection in November.) If Merkley and Fetterman are backing Chavez-DeRemer, it’s easy to imagine Sanders helping her out of committee as well.

Indeed, the aforementioned senior labor movement source believes Chavez-DeRemer’s biggest battle will be with her own party, where opposition to unions is deeply rooted in decades of practical and ideological machinations.

It’s remarkable that a Teamsters-endorsed backer of legislation despised by anti-union forces in the GOP ended up as the Labor Department nominee of a Republican president. It’s remarkable she could lose dozens of votes from Democrats, despite union backing. It’s most remarkable, however, that Chavez-DeRemer is actually poised to join Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard in Trump’s realignment cabinet.

One well-placed GOP source explained the dynamic like this. “Republicans are not thrilled about her,” they said. “But they’re going to vote for her.” Donald Trump gets what he wants from the party he remade.

In reality, Trump might be the most radically libertarian commander-in-chief in US history. This, contrary to the fears of #Resistance liberals who created an entire cottage industry devoted to fighting Trumpian dictatorship; contrary, too, to the dreams of populists, “post-liberals,” and others in the so-called New Right who imagined that Trump would reconcile American conservatism with the state and promote the use of government power for Right-wing ends.

The fascist theory of Trump remains prevalent among progressives to this day, and received a boost in the closing days of the election when a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly went on record calling Trump a fascist — which allowed Harris, Hillary Clinton, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and a whole host of Democratic leaders to pile on with the fascist assertion. In The New Yorker, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder greeted the news of Trump’s electoral victory by calling Trump a fascist along with his “close fascist allies,” Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

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Trump is vindictive, no doubt. By one estimate, he has made more than 100 threats to “investigate, prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish his perceived opponents”. But fascism has come to be a slippery label. As The Washington Examiner has archly put it, “fascism is anything Democrats don’t like”.

The libertarian explanation, by contrast, is becoming more plausible by the day. Trump has made no secret of his leanings in this regard. In May, he spoke at the Libertarian Party National Convention — the “first president in history” to do so, as he boasted. His address, in which he attempted to stake his libertarian credentials, was remarkably on-message: “I will be a true friend to libertarians in the White House, and I am proud to be the only president in 70 years who started no new wars. I took on the military-industrial complex. I broke the stranglehold on neocons and warmongers on the Republican Party…. I withdrew from the Paris Accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun UN arms treaty, and I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization”. He concluded by saying: “We want libertarian votes because you stand for what we stand for”.

The address was a somewhat strange spectacle, since Trump was booed by the crowd through much of it. Deep-dyed libertarians from the crowd shouted that he was a “tyrant” and “had crushed our rights”; one held up a sign calling him a “wannabe dictator”. But Trump’s position was that he had simply made libertarianism work tactically by tying it to the GOP. “What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party getting 3%?” he argued with the crowd, inviting it to join forces with him.

Trump’s October interview with Joe Rogan — featuring his largest audience of the entire election cycle — was distinctly libertarian, as well. He argued for eliminating the income tax and railed against government regulation. He declared an intent to remove all governmental impediments to business, to make government truly as small as possible.

In tandem with his tax-eliminating, government-downsizing rhetoric, Trump developed a partnership with a number of Wall Street and Silicon Valley barons, culminating in Musk throwing his massive financial weight behind the GOP ticket. The two things — the libertarian rhetoric and the new alliances in tech and finance — went hand-in-hand, resulting in policy moves that should have utterly confounded Trump’s populist fans during the campaign.

Take Trump’s stance on legislation to ban TikTok unless the social-media platform separates itself from its Chinese owners. It should have been a perfectly Trumpian policy, striking at two birds, Big Tech and “Chy-na,” with one stone. Yet Trump came out against the ban, having earlier backed it, without offering a coherent explanation. It was notable, though, that one of Trump’s big libertarian backers, the hedge-fund honcho Jeff Yass, controls a minority stake in TikTok estimated to be worth north of $30 billion as of spring 2024.

Another telling campaign moment came when Trump appeared on an X (formerly Twitter) space with Musk and congratulated the world’s richest man for swiftly firing workers who organise to defend their mutual interests. A better Harris campaign might have made more of that unguarded moment for the way it belied Trump’s pro-worker rhetoric. Even Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters and a rare trade-union leader willing to work with the GOP, was forced to accuse Trump and Musk of waging “economic terrorism”.

On immigration, too, Trump has allowed his libertarian instincts to run wild. This might appear surprising, since border restrictionism was and remains one of the signature elements of his agenda. But opposing chaos at the border isn’t incompatible with a libertarian stance. Many libertarians object to illegal migration, even as they support making it easier for labor to cross borders as a means to lowering its price.

During his campaign, for example, Trump said that the advent of artificial intelligence requires the United States to bring in “more people.” He also offered green cards to all graduating foreign university students, even those taking two-year associates degrees. These stances should have raised concerns among Trump’s populist supporters, but their enthusiasm swept all doubt.

Now, as his administration takes decisive shape, Trump is translating his libertarian instincts into personnel choices. The planned Department of Governmental Efficiency — headed by Musk and the venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy — is only the most visible. Musk has claimed that he could eliminate up to $2 trillion worth of expenditures from the federal government. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramasaway described themselves empowering a “lean team of small-government crusaders … to cut the federal government down to size.”

Likewise, on the use of H1B visas that allow tech firms to import cheap workers, Trump sided with the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy — over and against his populist base. Last month, the president-elect told the New York Post, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

Other personnel choices bespeak similar intuitions: from snubbing his first-term tariff guru Robert Lighthizer for the top job at the Treasury in favor of Wall Street stalwart Scott Bessent; to tapping Howard Lutnick, another Wall Street man who has advocated for eliminating the income tax, to serve as commerce secretary. True, there are a handful of exceptions, such as his choice to lead the Department of Labor, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, a rare Republican who favors strengthening collective bargaining; and Gail Slater, an antitrust crusader nominated to the Federal Trade Commission.

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These exceptions damn Trump in the eyes of “official” Washington libertarians, who view him as not nearly pure or orthodox enough. But Trump isn’t pure or orthodox on anything, and the salient question isn’t whether he qualifies as libertarian for the purists, but the overall makeup of his political inclinations. On that front, his plans for a massive reduction in government are a better fit for libertarianism than for populism, much less fascism.

This isn’t to play down the Trump threat from a progressive perspective. Libertarianism is a naïve ideology that risks cutting deeply into the core functions of a state. What’s insidious about libertarianism is that it looks good at first. Listening to Trump talk about over-taxation and overregulation with Rogan, I couldn’t help but nod along. The problem is the erosion of state capacity and mounting red ink.

In his first term, Trump increased the deficit by $8 trillion — a direct result of tax cuts that endeared him to Wall Street while slashing the US tax base without generating any other source of revenue to replace it. This time around, Trump and the Republicans are determined to maintain his earlier tax cuts while dramatically diminishing the state. That’s a recipe for a plutocratic order that rewards those at the top, while squeezing the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

There is simply no way to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, as Co-President Musk aims to do, without eating into entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. So-called entitlement reform is deeply unpopular among nearly all social segments, Republicans and Democrats — except for the Wall Street fee-skimmers who’d benefit from administering privatized benefits and, of course, libertarian think-tankers in Washington.

Trump’s penchant for pulling all attention toward himself is reminiscent of a Mussolini type and thus seems to foreshadow an authoritarian takeover. But real authoritarianism takes work that Trump is uninvested in — and a state he’s unwilling to fund. He has a businessman’s revulsion for taxes and regulations. The other aspects of his worldview, including ones that seem to contradict his aversion to the state, amount to tactical maneuvring in service of his deeper pro-business agenda. That puts him in the libertarian camp, whether the libertarians themselves like it or not.