Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a leading liberal activist, met privately with then-White House adviser Steve Bannon in a Washington D.C. restaurant in March.
Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, was seeking ways to recruit left-wing groups to aid Trump’s agenda. Little apparently resulted from the meeting.
“Look, I will meet with virtually anyone to make our case, and particularly in that moment, I was very, very concerned about the budget that would decimate public education,” Weingarten told the Intercept in an interview published Wednesday. “I wanted it to be a real meeting, I didn’t want it to be a photo-op, so I insisted that the meeting didn’t happen at the White House.”
Bannon, a hard-line conservative who parted ways with the White House in August, was apparently reaching out to several liberal leaders at the time in hopes of building ad-hoc coalitions.
Weingarten is a long-time friend of Hillary Clinton and ensured that the teachers union was the first major union to endorse Clinton during her 2016 presidential bid. Weingarten faced considerable internal opposition to the endorsement since many rank-and-file members preferred Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. During the campaign season, Weingarten worked closely with the Democratic National Committee in an effort to link Trump to an increase in bullying at schools, leaked emails revealed. She has remained a frequent critic of the president.
Weingarten was nevertheless intrigued enough to talk to Bannon. They discussed “education, infrastructure, immigrants, bigotry and hate, budget cuts … [and] about a lot of different things,” she said. “I think he sees the world as working people versus elites. And on some level, he’s thought about educators as working-class folks.”
Labor leaders have been worried about Trump’s appeal to to the union rank-and-file. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in August that the union vote swung 13 points in favor of the Republican ticket compared with the 2012 election. The American Federation of Teachers is a part of the AFL-CIO labor federation.
Bannon was apparently looking for ways to build on that support, an effort that alarmed Weingarten: “I came out of that conversation saying that this was a formidable adversary.”
A representative for the union could not be reached for comment.
