The “League of American Workers” Consists of One Guy

The League of American Workers is a “populist right, pro-worker organization,” according to its founder, Steve Cortes, a longtime conservative pundit and former Donald Trump spokesperson. The group’s website claims Cortes is leading “a young and growing movement of pro-worker patriotic populism.” 

There’s certainly plenty of room to grow, The Intercept found. By all indications, this “league” is a one-man show without apparent ties to the “disregarded American workers” Cortes claims to represent. Instead, the League of American Workers has links to GOP dark money and a network of conservative websites dressed up to look like local news outlets.

“Of course it is astroturfing,” said Jody Calemine, director of advocacy at AFL-CIO. “Its founder is a TV personality with a far-right agenda.” 

Speaking for American workers is a new gig for Cortes, a Georgetown graduate who toiled on Wall Street before landing a Trump administration role and founding a boutique consultancy for “institutional investors and sophisticated individuals” that he runs to this day. Since its launch in 2023, Cortes has used the League of American Workers as a comms shop to peddle an anti-union version of blue-collar populism. His league is also one of dozens on the advisory board for Project 2025.

Cortes would not answer basic questions about the leadership structure and funding for the League of American Workers and did not provide details about his group’s role in Project 2025.

“I’m honored to help the crucial Project 2025 effort,” he told The Intercept, “to fully staff up a second Trump term with the most talented and philosophically aligned public servants possible to implement an America First national renewal.” 

John Logan, a labor historian who has written about astroturfing strategies, said it was tempting to dismiss Cortes “as a Georgetown-educated MAGA supporter trying to pretend to be this populist who cares about the working class.”

“To the extent there is a coherent message,” Logan said after reviewing the League of American Workers’ skeletal website and videos, “it is a very deliberate strategy to win in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.” 

“It’s sometimes difficult to predict who will be the most effective spokesperson for right-wing populism.”

Suits to Baseball Caps

“Patriots, I am coming to you from a crime scene: the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Cortes said in the opening of a recent video bashing President Joe Biden on immigration. 

The talking points are familiar terrain for Cortes, who pitched MAGA border policies as Trump’s campaign spokesperson and emissary to Hispanic voters. Something’s changed, though: Cortes, a former hedge fund trader, ditched his suit and tie for a baseball hat as he beams at a segment of the border fence he once hawked on primetime.

Cortes has burned through titles and positions over the past decade, many of them contradictory. While squawking on CNBC, he was a harsh critic of then-candidate Trump’s populism (and hat choices), then he joined Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaign teams. At Trump’s direction, he became a CNN contributor to be, as Cortes characterized it recently, “his spokesman and advocate on that network.” 

Cortes’ CV also includes a brief stint at Newsmax and stumping for J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign in 2022.

Over the past year, Cortes flipped from Team Trump to Team DeSantis and back again. He helped lead a super PAC backing Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, then stepped away last October to launch a poorly watched YouTube channel, which he’s seemingly abandoned. After the Iowa caucuses in January, Cortes crawled back on the Trump train with a mea culpa on Fox Business using his League of American Workers title.

Cortes’s latest project is similarly contradictory and a bit of a mystery. On C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” he vaguely described it as “a nonprofit advocacy group.”

“We are a populist right, pro-worker organization,” Cortes told host Mimi Geerges in July. Repeatedly using the first-person plural to describe the League of American Workers, Cortes added that immigration and trade were “our” main issues.

Dark Money and a Secret Board

Cortes announced the launch of the League of American Workers on his Substack last year, shortly before he endorsed DeSantis.

“Who advocates for workers? Unions claim they do, but corrupt leadership pursues leftist agendas instead,” Cortes wrote. “The new League of American Workers steps into this void.” Union “corruption” has been one of his drumbeats. In a brief appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast on launch day, Cortes said unions were “all about corruption.” 

“If you’re so moved, please support us economically,” he said, plugging a newly launched website. “This is amazing, brother,” Bannon said. “You should have done this a long time ago, but great you’re doing it now. You’re the guy that could be the spokesman for this.”

Given the name Cortes chose, the structure of the League of American Workers is puzzling.

The word “league” suggests an organization with members or affiliates — say, the League of Conservation Voters, the Urban League, or even a local bowling league. But the League of American Workers is “not a member organization,” Cortes told The Intercept.

“There’s nothing about this that looks like a democratic organization where workers actually have any power,” said the AFL-CIO’s Calemine.

Cortes said the League of American Workers has just three board members, himself and two others, whom he would not name.

 “We don’t disclose funding and we have a board,” he said in an email.

“I don’t want to publicize name [sic] until required.”

His group’s paper trail, which would generally show details like who’s on the board, is difficult to follow. Records show the League of American Workers incorporated in Ohio in March 2023, and its single-page bylaws indicate it operates as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit under the federal tax code. 

But there is no record of the group in the IRS or Ohio attorney general’s nonprofit registries. Cortes said the League of American Workers has “filed with the IRS,” but he did not respond to follow-up questions about its current status with the IRS. 

Cortes also does not want to talk about where the League of American Workers gets its money. Its incorporation papers were filed by David Langdon, a Cincinnati-based lawyer with deep ties to conservative dark-money networks. 

Langdon, who did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, is a “known entity in the world of dark money,” according to Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. 

Cortes dodged a question about his funding on C-SPAN, thanking unspecified “generous donors throughout the country.”

“Patriots who want to see that there is an organization that does in many ways what the labor unions used to do, or at least were intended to do, which is advocate for American workers,” Cortes said of his donor base. His website mentions “sustaining donors” but does not list them.

A donation button links to WinRed, a conservative funding platform. Neither the website nor the WinRed profile mentions that donations to 501(c)(4) groups are not tax-deductible.

“If his concern is corruption,” said Calemine, “he should disclose every penny of funding he receives, from whom, and what it is spent on, vendor by vendor.”

In League with Pink Slime

Although no longer an official campaign spokesperson, Cortes has used the League of American Workers to put out a flood of pro-Trump material, a mix of lengthy videos and articles. 

His group “produces frequent op-eds and reporting on the issues most critical to American workers,” according to its website. “These pieces appear in national opinion platforms as well as local journalistic outlets across the country.”

But the “local journalistic outlets” baked into Cortes’s comms strategy are primarily “pink slime” entities with websites that look like local news at first glance. The “Waukesha Times,” for example, is run by Metric Media, which has a network of more than 1,200 “pink slime” websites. It has no masthead, and most of its articles carry no individual byline. 

Cortes did not answer questions about his relationship with Metric Media, which goes back to his days as a Trump campaign spokesperson. In 2020, dozens of Metric Media sites published cookie-cutter opinion pieces under his byline, according to analysis by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. 

“OPINION: Three Nevada questions for Joe Biden,” read one headline in the “Silver State Times” in October 2020. The same month, the “Hawkeye Reporter” ran a similar article, also attributed to Cortes: “OPINION: Three Iowa questions for Joe Biden.” A third, courtesy of the “Sunshine Sentinel,” also in October 2020: “OPINION: Three Florida questions for Joe Biden.” 

Since 2020, Metric Media sites have continued to show a deep interest in Cortes’s work, even republishing one of his Substack posts in the “Grand Canyon Times” in 2022. 

This election cycle, the copy-paste articles and headlines remain, framed around the League of American Workers itself. 

“League of American Workers President: ‘Wisconsinites won’t be fooled’ by Biden’s sudden new executive order on the border,” blared one headline in “The Sconi” in June. The same day, two other Metric Media sites carried almost identical articles, with minor variations in the text and headline to target Arizonans and Georgians.

These posts, like many on Metric Media sites, have no individual byline and feature the same headshot Cortes uses on his group’s website. The Intercept found posts featuring the League of American Workers on Metric Media sites targeted at the battleground states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia.

There are other ties between Cortes and Metric Media, including a shared mailbox. 

The League of American Workers uses a private mailbox in Chicago, according to a letter Cortes provided The Intercept. BlockShopper, a company which is part of the Metric Media network, uses the same private mailbox. (After BlockShopper was caught using fake bylines for its content mill, it rechristened itself numerous times, most recently as Pipeline Media.) 

Metric Media also promotes Cortes aggressively on social media, running more than 200 Facebook ads since November 2023 pushing League of American Workers content. Most recently, on Saturday, the network launched ads on Facebook and Instagram with links to a post on the “Grand Canyon Times” slamming Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration.

The timing of some of these ads is also suggestive. On Tuesday, July 16, the League of American Workers started running Facebook ads for a new video bashing Biden over housing prices in Arizona. The same day, Metric Media launched ads on Facebook and Instagram to promote Cortes’s video, which also linked to a post on the “Grand Canyon Times.”

Metric Media and BlockShopper did not respond to The Intercept’s questions either.

Pricey Polls and Another Pivot

Many of Metric Media’s posts about the League of American Workers are writeups of the numerous election polls Cortes has commissioned. 

“Yes we do a lot of polling and issue work,” Cortes told The Intercept, adding he was “getting a bit more campaign focused into November.” 

Since last year, Cortes has published results from 13 polls sponsored by the League of American Workers in swing states. His polls have found their way to FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, and The Hill, including a single-district poll that drilled into the House district in Omaha, Nebraska.

As Cortes wrote on Substack, Trump lost this district in 2020 by 6 percentage points. “But it would behoove those of us backing his candidacy to also invest in Nebraska 2, where the battle is slightly uphill but eminently winnable,” he wrote. 

These polls — a mix of phone and online surveys ranging from 600 to 1,400 likely voters — are not cheap. One of the two firms Cortes retained, North Star Opinion Research, a go-to conservative polling shop, has charged between $12,000 and more than $75,000 for its services, according to campaign finance data from the past four years. 

“What we charge for our work is between us and our clients,” said Dan Judy, a research analyst at North Star, “and we keep it private unless disclosure is required by law.”

The purpose of all these polls is to find the most effective narratives and arguments to sway voters toward Trump, as Cortes himself has made clear.

“We’re trying to find out, OK, where are people, and if they’re not in the place we want, then how do we move them?” he explained in May to conservative radio host Dan Proft, who has his own connections to Metric Media.

In June, ahead of the now infamous debate between Trump and Biden, Cortes distilled what League of American Workers polls showed about “where Trump will find the most resonance.”

“What are the poll-tested themes and messages that work?” Cortes wrote, highlighting North Star’s survey results about Biden’s perceived cognitive decline, immigration, and inflation. “With these powerful messages, delivered with the right combination of strength and empathy, Trump can turn his current modest battleground leads into commanding ones. Time to start saving America.”

With Harris now at the top of the Democratic ticket, Cortes has had to pivot once again. Now his one-man show is hitting Harris on everything from immigration to gun rights to reparations. Speaking from his League of American Workers perch, Cortes has been quoted attacking Harris in at least two ostensibly different Metric Media outlets, with the kind of geographically targeted red-meat messaging he’ll be slinging until November: