Union Bosses Go After Donald Trump

A substantial minority of union households—about 40 percent—typically vote Republican in any given election cycle, but Donald Trump is threatening to shatter the mold. A new report from an AFL-CIO group found that the Republican frontrunner received more support from union members who had already decided on a candidate (18 percent) than Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders combined (16 percent). According to the report, most Trump backers are “fed-up voters” who support him because “he says what he thinks.”

But his popularity doesn’t sit well with union bosses—who almost exclusively support Democratic candidates. “Donald Trump is nothing but a house of cards,” said AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. “Once we educate people, the house of cards comes crashing down.” To ensure it does, the AFL-CIO has launched digital ads attacking Trump in order to “dampen union workers’ enthusiasm for him.” The union’s grassroots affiliate, Working America, is heading up an aggressive door-to-door campaign that will include half a million “conversations” with Ohio voters leading up to the election.

It shows just how desperate Big Labor is to uphold the status quo. As it stands now, union bosses donate millions of dollars to Democratic politicians to implement their left-wing agenda and push pro-union policies—their return on investment. According to the Center for Union Facts, America’s major unions sent nearly $420 million to the Democratic Party and closely aligned special interest groups from 2012 to 2014. Working America, for instance, supplied left-wing groups with more than $30 million of its own money.

But the dues-paying union members who supply the cash are starting to revolt. In the words of Brian Sepe, a member of the United Steelworkers, “My country is going to hell…Trump is a no bull—- kind of guy. He calls it what it is.”

It begs the question: Can union leadership stop the bleeding in time?

For more, you can read the April edition of “Labor Watch” here.

This blog post was adapted from the April edition of Capital Research Center’s “Labor Watch,” by Steven J. Allen.