Trump Uses Labor Day To Bash Labor Boss: 'No Wonder Unions Are Losing So Much'
Monday was a federal holiday, but President Donald Trump wasn’t taking it off.
He used some early morning Labor Day Twitter posts to attack one of the biggest names in organized labor.
And predicted he would win traditionally Democratic union votes in the 2020 election.
Trump was responding to an appearance by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on “Fox News Sunday” where the union leader attacked the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal that’s intended to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Trumka also claimed Trump has not lived up to his promises to improve the economy for average workers.
“I’ve tried to call balls and strikes with him,” Trumka told host Christ Wallace. “When he does something that’s good for workers, I say so. When he does something that’s bad for workers, I say so.
“And I have to say, unfortunately, while he may not even know what his administration is doing, they’ve done more things to hurt workers than they have to help them. And that’s unfortunate.”
Trump wasn’t buying that. In his Twitter posts, he accused Trumka of playing politics.
“Just watched AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on @FoxNews and thought to myself how different he is on TV than he is when he is with me at the White House. Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on. We got robbed on Trade and everything else while his Dems just sat back and watched,” Trump wrote.
“NAFTA is the worst Trade Deal ever made – terrible for labor – and Richard let it stand. No wonder unions are losing so much. The workers will vote for me in 2020 (lowest unemployment, most jobs ever), and should stop paying exorbitant $Dues, not worth it!”
….and watched. NAFTA is the worst Trade Deal ever made – terrible for labor – and Richard let it stand. No wonder unions are losing so much. The workers will vote for me in 2020 (lowest unemployment, most jobs ever), and should stop paying exorbitant $Dues, not worth it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 2, 2019
Trump’s tweets were greeted by a storm of liberals responding — they didn’t take Labor Day off either, apparently.
But his claim that union workers will vote for him in the 2020 election is worth considering — even if organized labor at the top is basically an arm of the Democratic Party.
In his interview with Wallace, Trumka acknowledged that Trump had gotten more union votes in the 2016 election than Mitt Romney did in 2012, but didn’t take it far enough.
As The Washington Post reported in the days immediately after the election, Trump didn’t just get union votes, he got “Reagan-like support from union households.”
That’s big. It was Reagan’s crossover appeal to normally Democratic voters that made him the dominant force in American politics in the 1980s. And it’s especially big considering Trump had no track record when he scored that support in 2016 — and virtually no one thought he had a chance of defeating Hillary Clinton.
Heading into the 2020 election, Trump has not only a strong economy to his credit, he is also blessed to have certified lunatics in positions of power in the Democratic Party — and unions can see for themselves what leftists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “squad” want to bring to the American economy.
At one time, the Democratic Party might have been the champion of the American worker, but those days are long passed.
The 2020 Democrats are almost certainly too obsessed with race, with “privilege” and with “climate change” hysteria to maintain their traditional hold on union households. (Teachers and other white-collar government unions excepted, of course. They’re as bad as the DNC.)
In the 1980s, another Republican president who revived the nation’s economy and restored American preeminence in world affairs after a dismal Democratic administration brought “Reagan Democrats” into American politics.
Even if history rarely repeats itself exactly, a good chance that a quarter-century later, another Republican president reviving the economy after a dismal Democratic presidency will be able to do something similar.
Democrats bent on proving how “woke” they are have abandoned their labor base. Donald Trump hasn’t.
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