Labor leaders had a muted reaction to President Trump’s inauguration Friday, noting that they agreed with many parts of his first speech as president despite having campaigned aggressively against his election.
“We are ready to work with the Trump admin consistent with our values — and we will never back down from our values. #Inauguration,” tweeted AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
“We are prepared to partner with @realDonaldTrump to create & sustain good jobs for all Americans. Unions are a part of the solution,” said the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and personal friend of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, summed up the labor elite’s conflicted feelings: “Trump has some great lines — that we as the labor movement have championed forever…but America First =American isolationism #Inauguration”.
Weingarten, who opposes Trump’s nominee to be Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, then added in a follow-up tweet: “Trump said what (his base) & all Americans want to hear: that we won’t be forgotten. Yet his cabinet tells a far different story.”
Trump used populist rhetoric in his inaugural address that wouldn’t have been out of place in a union leader’s speech. He said that while many Americans were well-off, “for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities (and) rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” He criticized policies that have “enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry.”
Former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse observed, “Until he got to the American First stuff, Trump was sounding just like Bernie Sanders in discussing industrial America.”
