President Trump boasted Thursday that he is bending the leadership of organized labor his way by driving a wedge between them and rank-and-file union members, saying that he has a special bond with the people in building and construction trades.
“I have been in construction and building all of my life and I love it. I love the smell of a construction site, right? There is something about it. We didn’t always get the union leadership of the big unions, but we got the workers. We got the workers. And some of the those leaders had big problems because the workers were with Trump. Because they know I hired the Teamsters, thousands of Teamsters. And I hired all of the carpenters and the electricians and all of the people that built a lot of buildings in Manhattan and all over the place. And they got it. The workers got it, and now I think the leadership is actually getting it. I really believe that. I think the leadership is getting it,” Trump said to roaring applause from union workers during a speech about infrastructure in Richfield, Ohio.
Trump’s margin of victory in the 2016 election came largely from the Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, where unions are heavily represented, despite an effort by union leaders to boost Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Union leaders have conceded that Trump did exceedingly well among their rank and file. “In the last election President Trump got 3 percentage points more of our members than Mitt Romney did. Unfortunately, Hillary [Clinton] got 10 percent of our members less than Barack Obama did. They either didn’t vote or they voted for a third-party candidate,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters in August. The AFL-CIO, one of the few organizations that surveys union member voting, has not released the full data for the election.
Union leaders have been scathing in their criticism of Trump, with Trumka denouncing Trump’s policies as “racist.” They have nevertheless praised his policies on occasion and several have met privately with the president and his top staffers.
