President Donald Trump has been a disappointment to working men and women, according to Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Wednesday.
Trumka said during a breakfast with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor that big labor would focus on the rust belt ahead of 2018, asserting that voters who supported Trump are having regrets.
He also characterized a White House made up of racists and “Wall Streeters.”
“You had two factions in the White House. You had one faction that actually had some of the policies that we would have supported on trade, on infrastructure, but they turned out to be racist,” Trumka told reporters. “And on the other hand, you had people who weren’t racist, but they were Wall Streeters.”
“And the Wall Streeters began to dominate the administration and have moved his agenda back to everything he fought against in the election,” he continued. Trumka’s characterization that the Wall Streeters are dominating the White House comes shortly after Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon, prominent voices that have pushed back against globalism and past U.S. trade deals, were ousted from their White House positions.
Trumka, for his part, ratcheted up rhetoric after Charlottesville.
Trumka explained in an Aug. 16 New York Times op-ed why he quit the president’s business council, just days after the events of Charlottesville captured the nation’s attention. Trumka took issue with what he considered a weak response to the terrible events that left one civilian and two Virginia State Troopers dead.
“Rather than ‘draining the swamp,’ President Trump has filled his cabinet with the authors and beneficiaries of our broken economic rules,” Trumka said at the time. “His [Trump’s] response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville was the last straw.”
Trumka argued Wednesday that the president has disappointed working men and women that supported him over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. He argued that 10,000 to 15,000 people “changed the course of history” by delivering Trump the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“We will get people out who are not interested in voting and get them out,” Trumka said.
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