Trump Redirects Amtrak Executuve Bonuses To Union Workers

🚨 BREAKING: In an incredible Christmas surprise, the Trump administration is sending $900 BONUSES to 18,000 THOUSAND Amtrak workers...

...and the money is coming from CUTTING top executives' perks.

"It's budget neutral. We aren't spending more federal money or Amtrak money.… pic.twitter.com/tqsyYRPqKG

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 12, 2025

Yesterday I said that both William F Buckley Jr and Edmund Burke are irrelevant with Trump as president. I was commenting on a piece by David Strom, a writer for Salem Media, who seems to be a nice enougfh kid who went to college and learned a little bit about Edmund Burke, although college doesn't seem to have taught him how to write. (Actually, I looked him up, and he has a master's from Duke in Poli Sci. He really ought to have had more intelligent things to say about Burke, and he should definitely be able to write better.)

Let's take a look at Edmund Burke (1729-1797). He's noted now primarily for Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which according to Wikipedia "asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society". According to this piece in The American Conservative,

Though it may surprise people who have been taught that Edmund Burke is the father of modern conservatism, the Burkeans were, in fact, defeated by a rival group with a nearly diametrically opposed view. The leader of that group was William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review. When, in 1952, Buckley first articulated his philosophy in God and Man at Yale, he called it “individualism,” though the nearly absolute laissez-faire philosophy he advocated became better known as libertarianism.

How did Buckley prevail? He deftly co-opted [Russell] Kirk[, who had introduced Burke to a modern audience in The Conservative Mind,] by inviting him to write a regular column for National Review, something Kirk could not afford not to do after imprudently giving up his faculty position. Kirk abhorred the libertarian direction in which Buckley and colleagues were taking conservatism. Kirk later denounced libertarianism for revering “self-interest, closely joined to the nexus of cash payment” rather than Burke’s “community of souls.” He complained that libertarians take “the state for the great oppressor” although Burke taught that government “is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” Yet for the quarter-century that he wrote for the magazine, Kirk held his tongue.

Let's get a few things straight about Burke and the French Revolution. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Was the French Revolution a working-class revolution?" It answered,

The French Revolution was a bourgeois (middle-class) revolution, not a working-class one in the modern sense. The revolution was led by wealthy merchants, lawyers, and bankers who sought to dismantle the feudal system and its restrictions to advance their own economic and political interests.

The link at The American Conservative continues,

At the most fundamental level, Burke was a communitarian. It is institutions—governmental, professional, religious, educational, and otherwise—that compose the fabric of society. Each of these institutions has classes of people who devote their careers to preserving and improving them: jurists serve the law, scholars their disciplines and universities, clerics their church, and so on.

. . . Maybe Buckley’s was the necessary path in the 1950s. Conservatism then needed to differentiate itself starkly from the prevailing liberalism. Burkeanism would have made that difficult because, as Kirk often observed, Burke was both a conservative and a liberal.

This is the big problem with Burke: David Brooks was able to call Barack Obama a Burkean because, after all, the governmental consensus by 2008 had been liberal for generations. We had a tradition of things like abortion and DEI. Obama was the true conservative! And if you think about it, the French Revolution that Burke opposed nevertheless installed institutions and outlooks that have dominated Western thinking for two and a half centuries: the constitutional abolition of nobility, the disestablishment of religion, the rule of the upper bourgeoisie in the form of lawyers and industrialists.

Burke wouid now either have to agree that these dislocations are permanent and traditional, or he would have to revise his program completely. But this also points to the failure of the main project of bourgeois democracy, the attempt to temporize with the working class via Fabian socialism. The idea was to implement various forms of labor reform and social insurance, but paying for it via a tax stucture based on working income that left the fortunes of the wealthiest intact. Again, Burke would have to support this or revert to some form of romantic medievalism.

On the other hand, Buckley himself was hardly a consisent libertarian. He himself was a rentier and a product of Yale, an institution designed to educate successive generations nf the wealthy and, following the introduction of the income tax, to shelter the interests of the wealthy from that tax, as I've discussed here. This is not Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, a libertarian Bible. Buckley wanted to try smoking pot, a subversive innovation Burke would oppose, but he had a solution: he would sail his yacht outside the three-mile limit and smoke it in international waters:

Asked whether he had ever smoked marijuana himself, Mr. Buckley laughed and said: “Yes. It was on my boat, outside the three‐mile limit—I'm a law‐and‐ order advocate, you know. To tell the truth, marijuana didn't do a thing for me.”

I suppose we could call Buckley a limousine libertarian. He deftly avoided any question of how he obtained the marijuana, which must have been while he was ashore and subject to federal and state law regarding its sale and possession.

Which brings me to the issue of Trump diverting money for Amtrak executive bonuses -- let's recall that Amtrak is a perennial money loser that suffers from frequent episodes where passengers are left for hours on stalled trains without heat or air conditioning, and trains are consistently eight to ten hours late -- to unionized workers.

This is a fascinating turnaround, a Republican president diverting money from Amtrak executives, who are in fact amoung the corporate elite; in 2023, its CEO earned a total of $1.1 million, with a base of $400,000, having done essentially nothing to make the trains worth riding -- and instead awarding a $900 Christmas bonus to 18,000 unionized workers. Not even the French Revolution did this sort of thing.

This isn't really new; Nixon began the process of courting organized labor in the 1972 election. But by 2024, Trump was campaigning as an old-fashioned Democrat, serving fries at a McDonald's and riding in a garbage truck. But those were just visuals; this is a concrete instance of reducing payments to the upper bourgeoisie and redirecting them to the working class:

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced Thursday it has helped redirect "exorbitant" executive payouts at Amtrak — put in place under the Biden administration — into $900 bonuses for more than 18,000 frontline workers.

. . . "Due to the urging of the Trump administration, end-of-year bonuses will now go to 18,000 frontline workers rather than being limited to the executive ranks," Mark Wallace, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said in a statement.

"This long-overdue recognition of the employees who keep the railroad moving is a step in the right direction."

. . . The move follows the Trump administration’s push for Amtrak’s executive leadership team to forfeit half of the bonuses they would have received under what the DOT described as "misplaced priorities."

Trump's innovation is something I don't think either Buckley or Burke could conceive: an alliance of the traditional working class with the traditional lower bourgeoisie. The basis of the alliance is to preserve the prosperity they had gained via the industrial revolution that's currently threatened by elite policies intended to expand the privileges and numbers of the underclass.