Rahm Emanuel has earned media attention for his sharp critiques of the Democratic Party, self-reflection, and his public calls for the mandatory retirement of members of Congress.
However, it is meatier things, some would argue less sexy criticisms that he has been making, such as education achievement goals in Mississippi and the importance of jobs in the trades that, while not earning big clicks, are very real issues to middle America. These are the voters that his party has ceded to Republicans in congressional races since 2010, and in both the 2016 and 2024 presidential contests.
The Washington Examiner sat down for an interview during his three-day swing through Michigan, a reliable state for Democrats in presidential elections until 2016 and 2024, when voters placed their support with Republican Donald Trump. Emanuel had just concluded a visit to the operating engineers training facility in Howell and a carpenters training center in Wayland.
The criticism of Emanuel is that he is blunt and too much of an insider. But what that criticism misses is that he is a guy who understands why his party is losing the very voters who supported his recruits as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman in 2006, when centrist Democrats upended the Republicans’ long-held majority in the House — candidates like former congressman Patrick Murphy of Bucks County, Pennsylvania; candidates who held middle-of-the-road positions on balanced budgets, support for the military, and often were pro-life. They won in places like Pennsylvania, and yes, even below the Mason-Dixon line.
His three-day visit here, discussing both jobs in the trades and the burgeoning skills gap, came just weeks after his visit to Mississippi to discuss that state’s success with education and the failures elsewhere where both his party and teachers’ unions have a strong hold.
Emanuel is a one-man director of persuading his party to “get back to the basics,” and the one that many Republicans have told me they are most fearful of should he run for and win his party’s nomination for president in 2028.
One of the proposals he laid out was a transitional effort for military service members, helping them make the adjustment from service to civilian life through the skilled trades. It is a bold and long-overdue proposal that provides 20,000 departing service members with a transition back to civilian life through the skilled trades, offering a $10,000 tax-free sign-on bonus to enroll in a registered apprenticeship to become electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and construction workers over a five-year period.
Emanuel’s visit here, along with his earlier education visit to Mississippi this year, where test scores among fourth graders improved dramatically, highlights his effort to have his party embrace education policy reforms to boost achievement and stop the emphasis on everything being about gender or race.
“This distracts us from the priorities of education,” Rahm told the Washington Post. Questions around gender identity, he said, affect “less than 1% of the population and yet dominate 99% of the conversation … You want to pick a pronoun? Great. Now, can we focus on the other 35 kids that don’t know what a godd*mn pronoun is?”
Emanuel told me that he went to Mississippi, a decidedly red state, and said these guys have an answer to the reading challenge. “We’re at a 30-year low in reading scores, and I don’t care if it’s Mississippi, I don’t care if it’s Michigan. I’m going to go where we know how to build America and build the American dream,” he said.
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Emanuel’s visit here was a striking contrast to fellow party members, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-CA) and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), both of whom struggled to articulate either positions or a greater purpose in media clips from Davos.
On the one hand, you have Ocasio-Cortez and Newsom sitting in the backdrop at the very background of elitism that has represented the growing chasm between the Democratic Party and the blue-collar folks that Emanuel is striking a chord with.
The same goes for education. Democrats used to reliably own the issue of being the champion of educating our children. But strident teacher union bosses, school closures, emphasis on gender, pronouns, pride celebrations, and abysmal education profiles coming from our public school students have fractured that relationship.
In the interview, Emanuel said that he’s been frustrated by the skill gap in this country for a while, but he really said that he felt an obligation to address the issue after the CEO of Ford said he had 5,000 jobs that pay six figures plus benefits, but he can’t find anyone to fill them.
“The sound of crickets was all that you hear in Washington,” he said. Emanuel added that the broadband industry has also said basically the same thing about being unable to find a skilled workforce. “That is why I am in Michigan. I thought I’d go right to the state identified with the auto industry, identified specifically with Ford, and say, ‘OK, here is my answer to the Ford CEO’s challenge, for all of us to meet the moment.’”
As Emanuel toured both facilities, whether he was talking with a woman working at the nuclear facility, or the carpenter now making $50 an hour plus benefits, or the operating engineer who went from a warehouse job making a little over minimum wage to now being able to purchase a home, his answer to the problem was if you served our country we are going to give you a $10,000 signing bonus to go into the trades.
“The bias within the GI bill is that if you pick the trades, you don’t get the housing assistance that kid gets that goes to college,” he explained.
Emanuel said there are 43 separate job-training programs in the book, funded by nine federal agencies. “And you have a CEO saying, ‘I can’t find anybody.’ Well, that is a wake-up call. What we are doing is broken, and hoping for a different result is not going to work,” he said.
Emanuel said that while there are a lot of people in his party who are talking about free college, “Well, what about these trade jobs? First of all, AI can’t replace a carpenter, an electrician, etc. But wait a second — when you say ‘free college,’ you’re putting your 2 cents down on what you value. And if you want to win back the working class, maybe you want to show a little interest in building the working class.”
The congressman and former chief of staff to then-President Barack Obama knows a little bit about what our military force needs and what our country can build for it. He says that we are not meeting the moment because we have failed to prepare our workforce to do so.
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“A part of the national security, directly, every year for the last decade, was the funding of two nuclear submarines to be built. And every year, for the last 10 years, we have only produced one and a quarter. Why? Because we don’t have enough tradesmen.”
Emanuel stressed that it’s not because it’s not in our budget. “There simply are not the pipe fitters and the electricians and all the tradesmen to do it. So you want to have a national security that has deterrence built into it and has credible deterrence,” he said. Emanuel added that it should be concerning that we are falling behind in building submarines and other weapons because we are short on tradesmen.
Emanuel said that he went to Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids because he saw the future in the same way he saw it in Mississippi. And, he said, there are solutions.
“Everything that ails America can be fixed by what’s working in America — that’s optimistic, and people are voting with their feet right now.”