Trip Gabriel and Jonathan Martin

With a blizzard of nearly 60 tweets and retweets on Wednesday, Trump attacked the leadership of a national firefighters’ union after it formally endorsed Biden, calling it “this dues sucking union,” and the president retweeted dozens of individuals claiming to be firefighters who support him.

It seemed a clear sign that Trump, who made inroads with rank-and-file union voters in 2016, especially in the industrial Midwest, was anxious about their loyalty. His Twitter posts — like an earlier attack on a United Auto Workers local president in Ohio — attempted to set rank-and-file union members against union leadership.

“Clearly he’s very worried about Joe Biden and the unions,” said Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, which has not endorsed any candidate.

In his first campaign speech on Monday, at a Teamsters building in Pittsburgh, Biden thanked a litany of unions, from teachers to steelworkers to carpenters, and declared, “I make no apologies: I am a union man.”

Trump’s campaign indicated it intends to hire an aide focused on union outreach, and the president himself has wooed some moderate national labor leaders, but any slippage he suffers with this blue-collar constituency could prove politically fatal next year: He was elected by only the narrowest of margins in a handful of states in the industrial Midwest.

What worries the president’s aides about Biden, according to people familiar with their thinking, is that his moderate profile and deep ties to labor could win back many of the voters who twice backed him and former President Barack Obama before spurning Hillary Clinton.

“Start right here in Pennsylvania and work your way up through Ohio, Michigan — that’s going to be the battleground and I think they come home,” Harold Schaitberger, the head of the pro-Biden national Firefighters union, said earlier this week in Pittsburgh.

The firefighters, who did not endorse any candidate in 2016, were sending an early signal that the former vice president would have labor support in a way that had eluded Clinton.

At an appearance in Iowa on Wednesday, Biden did not talk extensively about labor but alluded to Trump’s early-morning Twitter barrage.

“I understand the president’s been tweeting a lot about me this morning; I wonder why the hell he’s doing that,” Biden said with a hearty laugh, adding, “I imagine I’m going to be the object of his attention for a while, folks.”

He later added: “You know who built the middle class? Unions. Unions. Let me say it out loud.”

Trump’s challenge with labor could only grow steeper if he does not sign an infrastructure bill, a long-promised priority of his and many industrial unions. The prospect of a massive public works program is keeping the building trades unions on the sidelines right now, according to multiple labor officials, but if Trump does not deliver on this multibillion-dollar promise it would effectively give them permission to line up with a center-left Democrat like Biden.

The president and his Republican allies point to record low employment to claim that American workers have never done better, and that the president deserves re-election.

By retweeting dozens of Twitter messages purporting to be from active or retired firefighters who said they support him, Trump was exploiting a Democratic vulnerability with organized labor: While union leaders almost exclusively endorse Democrats, many rank-rand-file members vote Republican.

The Trump 2016 candidacy exposed this discrepancy. Internal polling released by the AFL-CIO showed Trump won 3% more union voters than the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, while Clinton won 10% fewer voters than President Barack Obama in 2012.

Rank-and-file union workers, especially in industrial fields, have defected from their historic allegiance to Democrats over social issues like gun rights and abortion, and in 2016 Trump won many of their votes while promising to crack down on trade deals and illegal immigration.

But in midterm elections in November, Democrats in three key states Trump carried — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — improved on their 2016 performance, winning every statewide office.

In Michigan, where Trump won 40% of voters from union households in 2016, the Republican candidate for governor carried only 36% of union households last year, according to exit polls.

John Russo, a retired labor studies professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio, said Trump’s strategy of appealing to the rank-and-file “plays into a resentment many workers are feeling about their position in society and their companies and their own future.”

But Russo said the ardor for Trump by blue-collar workers appears to be diminishing in places like northeast Ohio, where the economic picture has worsened despite Trump’s promise in 2017 to workers not to “sell your houses” because jobs were coming back. “He kept promising all these new jobs,” Russo said. “What’s happened is it’s getting worse in northeast Ohio.”

In March, Trump seemed to blame the president of a United Auto Workers local in nearby Lordstown, Ohio, for a decision last year by General Motors to close an assembly plant there. Trump responded by posting on Twitter that the union president “ought to get his act together and produce.”

A few days before Biden visited Pittsburgh, workers at ATI Allegheny Ludlum’s steel mill in Washington, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, had mixed reactions to the president’s economic performance. In 2017 Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel to boost American jobs, but the record is mixed.

Chad Martin, a 36-year-old worker, heading from the parking lot to clock in for the swing shift, dismissed Biden’s message that he was labor’s best friend. “That’s old-school thought,” he said. “That’s what my dad thinks. He’s in his 50s. He’s a Democrat — union.” Martin said he became a Republican in his 20s when “I started thinking for myself.”

It was clear that many other rank and file workers also support the president. A worker named Mark, who declined to provide his full name, used an expletive to describe Trump, but said he was doing a good job. “He can’t keep his mouth shut,” he said. “But look at the economy. I just started working here three months ago, I’m making the best money of my life.”

Clark Jungo, 59, an inspector who has worked in the mill for decades, said the Trump tariffs hurt this mill. “We do specialty steel here,” he said. “It’s hurt us.”

Jungo was a Biden supporter. “He’s the dominant Democrat,” he said. “He’s our man.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/joe-biden-trump-unions.html" id="ced8ff78-018f-32da-a562-9eb3dd555a31">The New York Times</a>.

As Biden Woos Labor, Trump Uses a Twitter Barrage to Stake His Own Claim

Two days after Joe Biden defined his 2020 campaign as a mission to take back blue-collar voters, his close relationship with unions was already getting under the skin of President Donald Trump, as the two men tussle over labor support in crucial Midwestern swing states.

The punishment came on a day when King’s own party leadership moved against him, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggesting King find “another line of work” and Sen. Mitt Romney saying he should quit. In an attempt to be proactive, the House Republicans stripped him of his committee seats in the face of multiple Democratic resolutions to censure King that are being introduced this week.

Those measures will force Republicans to take a stand on whether to go along with the House Democratic majority’s attempt to publicly reprimand one of their own.

Speaking to reporters Monday night after the congressional Republicans acted, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the party leader in the House, said he was not ruling out supporting a censure or reprimand resolution against King. He said the Republicans are not removing King from the GOP House conference itself so he can still attend its party meetings.

“I think voters have that decision to make. But I think we spoke loud and clear that we will not tolerate this in the Republican Party,” said McCarthy, who conferred privately with King for an hour Monday afternoon.

McCarthy called a special meeting of the Republican Steering Committee to consider removing King from Judiciary — which has jurisdiction over immigration, voting rights and impeachment — and Agriculture, which is a prized committee for Iowans. King also lost his seat on the Small Business Committee. The steering committee vote was unanimous.

King has been an ally of President Donald Trump on the border wall and other issues.

In an interview with The Times published Thursday, King said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

King defended himself in a House speech Friday, saying he was raising a historical question about language, and that he was “simply an American nationalist.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/politics/steve-king-house-judiciary-committee.html" id="86c24477-b1fd-3d3d-a00d-7f781c3eb745">The New York Times</a>.

Steve King Loses House Committee Seats Over White Supremacy Remark

House Republican leaders removed Rep. Steve King of Iowa from the Judiciary and Agriculture committees Monday night as party officials scrambled to appear tough on racism and contain damage from comments King made to The New York Times questioning why white supremacy is considered offensive.

King, who has been an ally of President Donald Trump on the border wall and other issues, has a long history of making racist remarks and demeaning comments about immigrants, but rarely drew rebukes from Republican leaders in Washington and Iowa. In November, top Iowa Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley endorsed King for re-election even after a House Republican denounced him as a white supremacist.

But in an interview with The Times published Thursday, King said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

Republican officials quickly turned on him, but the party also came in for criticism from the Senate’s lone black Republican, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. He noted that the GOP has long remained silent in the face of racist comments.

“Some in our party wonder why Republicans are constantly accused of racism — it is because of our silence when things like this are said,” Scott wrote in a Washington Post opinion column.

The scramble to condemn King also illustrated how alarmed senior Republicans are about the party’s image just two months after they lost 40 House seats, most of them in suburban or diverse districts — including seven in McCarthy’s home state of California, where the GOP is on the brink of extinction.

But Republicans’ pointed criticism of a single House lawmaker was striking because of what they have tolerated from the leader of their party.

The condemnations of King stood in stark contrast to the lawmakers’ willingness to tolerate Trump’s frequent offensive and insensitive remarks about migrants, black people, Native Americans and other minorities.

Just last week, the president used the Oval Office to unleash a blistering assault on immigrants in the country illegally, portraying them as criminals in a fashion that harkened back to an earlier era of American politics but rarely heard from a president in modern times. And on Sunday night, Trump invoked the Wounded Knee massacre of hundreds of Native Americans as an attempt to joke about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

“I’m glad that they are finally taking action after all of these years of Steve King slandering immigrants and Hispanics, but the president of the United States is also doing that and he just said something about Elizabeth Warren a few evenings ago that was also racially ugly and we haven’t heard a word of condemnation from anyone in the Republican Party about that,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas.

Congressional Republicans have continued to embrace the president and his hard-line immigration politics, averting their gaze from his inflammatory rhetoric out of fear their core voters will punish them if they stray from Trump.

One person withholding criticism of King was Trump. When asked by reporters Monday about the furor over King’s remarks, Trump said, “I haven’t been following it.”

Republicans are now trying to get ahead of a fast-moving political problem while the country is in the midst of a lengthy government shutdown over a border wall by Trump, who in many ways patterned his immigration policies and rhetoric on those of King.

On Sunday, McCarthy promised that “action will be taken” against King and said of the Iowan’s remarks, “That language has no place in America.”

McConnell said Monday that King’s remarks were “unwelcome and unworthy of his elected position.”

“If he doesn’t understand why ‘white supremacy’ is offensive, he should find another line of work,” McConnell said.

But it is not clear what, if any, additional steps congressional Republican leaders will take with King. The National Republican Congressional Committee indicated Monday that they were not ready to step away from him.

“The NRCC does not get involved in primaries and isn’t going to comment on a hypothetical general election two years away,” said Chris Pack, a spokesman for the House campaign arm.

Democrats are moving to censure or reprimand the Iowa congressman, a stinging penalty. A senior Democratic member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Bobby L. Rush of Illinois, announced Monday that he would introduce a resolution to censure King over a history of “rabid, racist remarks.”

“Republicans, in the interest of political expediency, sought his endorsement, ignored his racist remarks, and continued to elevate him to positions of influence,” Rush said. “Only now that his behavior is well known to those outside the beltway and tainted him politically, do they vigorously denounce him.”

Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, introduced another censure resolution Monday and in an interview said Reps. David Joyce, R-Ohio, and Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, had agreed to co-sponsor the measure.

“It is really important for us as a body, as a country, to be very clear, very forceful, to condemn these comments and hopefully stop this from happening again,” Ryan said. “This is not the kind of behavior and conversation that we want to be having here in the United States in 2019.”

Democratic leaders in the House have yet to say what they will do with the competing censure resolutions, but are inclined to allow a vote of some sort related to King’s remarks, according to one senior Democratic aide.

In the interview with The Times, King also reflected on the record number of minorities and women in the new Democratic-controlled House. “You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

King’s hard-line immigration policies and demeaning comments about Hispanics foreshadowed Trump’s nativist rhetoric in his 2016 campaign, in his two years in the White House and during the government shutdown over a border wall. The president once boasted to King that he raised more money for him than anyone else, King recalled in the Times article, which traced how the Iowa congressman helped write the playbook for white identity politics that dominate the Republican Party under Trump.

He has already drawn one serious primary opponent, state Sen. Randy Feenstra, for the 2020 campaign and some high-profile Republicans have indicated in recent days that they will not embrace his re-election.

“It does open the door for other individuals to take a look,” Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa said in a television interview last week of King’s closer-than-expected victory last year, noting that she had told him: “You need to decide whether you want to represent the values of the 4th district or do something else.”

Reynolds said she was staying out of the primary “right now,” but multiple Iowa Republicans said the state’s senior elected officials were unlikely to endorse King again and would wait until there is more clarity in the primary field before rallying to one of his GOP challengers. Other Western Iowa Republicans are expected to challenge King, who has fended off primaries before but did so with the support of his party and its top leaders.

In addition to Reynolds’ criticism, Iowa Republican chair Jeff Kaufmann said the state party would “remain neutral” in King’s primary.

Also, Iowa’s two Republican senators, Grassley and Joni Ernst, along with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who had appointed King a co-chairman of his 2016 presidential campaign, all rebuked King in recent days.

All had eagerly embraced him in the past because of his standing with the state’s most conservative voters — keys to winning statewide elections in Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation presidential nominating contest.

Grassley had endorsed King in November for re-election, even after the chairman of the House Republican election committee denounced King as a white supremacist.

“Iowa needs Steve King in Congress,” Grassley said in that endorsement. “I also need Steve King in Congress.”

Ernst, who faces re-election in 2020, appeared with King at a rally in his district the Monday before Election Day last year, after he had endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties.

King sits on the Judiciary, Small Business and Agriculture committees, and on a subcommittee on immigration and border security. Before Republicans lost their House majority in the midterm elections, he was chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice.

With a blizzard of nearly 60 tweets and retweets Wednesday, Trump attacked the leadership of a national firefighters’ union after it formally endorsed Biden, calling it “this dues sucking union,” and the president retweeted dozens of individuals claiming to be firefighters who support him.

Since announcing his candidacy last week, Biden has repeatedly invoked his decades-long bond with organized labor. In his first campaign speech Monday, at a Teamsters building in Pittsburgh, Biden thanked a litany of unions, from teachers to steelworkers to carpenters, and declared, “I make no apologies: I am a union man.”

Trump’s campaign indicated it intends to hire an aide focused on union outreach, and the president himself has wooed some moderate national labor leaders. He has twice held events at local facilities of the International Union of Operating Engineers, and last month in Texas he made the case to Jim Callahan, the union’s president, for why they should back his re-election, according to a Trump official briefed on the conversation.

But any slippage he suffers with this blue-collar constituency could prove politically fatal next year: He was elected by only the narrowest of margins in a handful of states in the industrial Midwest.

What worries the president’s aides about Biden, according to people familiar with their thinking, is that his moderate profile and deep ties to labor could win back many of the voters who twice backed him and President Barack Obama before spurning Hillary Clinton.

“Start right here in Pennsylvania and work your way up through Ohio, Michigan — that’s going to be the battleground and I think they come home,” Harold Schaitberger, the head of the pro-Biden International Association of Fire Fighters, said earlier this week in Pittsburgh.

The IAFF, who did not endorse any candidate in 2016, were sending an early signal that the former vice president would have labor support in a way that had eluded Clinton.

Still, most unions are unlikely to follow the IAFF with such an early endorsement, letting the primary race play out as many of the 20 announced Democrats pursue them. Some unions, such as those for teachers and nurses, are more liberal than industrial workers unions and feature many supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others.

Beth Allen, communications director for the Communications Workers of America, which represents 700,000 workers in the United States and Canada, said there was no particular groundswell for Biden among the union’s members, and that the union has seen enthusiasm for a variety of candidates.

“Nothing is wired this time,” said D. Taylor, who runs UNITE Here, a hospitality industry union. “We’re going to let our members and leaders listen and take it all in and then have a discussion. Let’s see how it shakes out this fall.”

Taylor — whose union includes the culinary workers in Nevada, the most muscular political group in that early-voting state — said he has heard from nearly every one of the major Democratic candidates but not from Trump.

Biden has long-standing relationships with many national and local labor leaders because he was often their de facto liaison in the Obama administration.

“Biden would actually give you a fair hearing,” said Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers. “When there were issues, you’d go to the vice president. So he has a reservoir of goodwill.”

Next week, Biden is planning to join a teachers union rally in Los Angeles.

Still, some labor leaders have said privately that they want to see if Biden’s early polling lead can hold up before they step into the race.

Biden has purposefully provoked Trump in his first days as a candidate, attacking the president on everything from free trade to a decline in American values. On Wednesday, Biden did not even bother feigning anger at the president’s online outburst, believing that it elevates his stature in the Democratic race to wage a days-long fight with a president his party loathes.

“I understand the president’s been tweeting a lot about me this morning; I wonder why the hell he’s doing that,” Biden said with a laugh, adding, “I imagine I’m going to be the object of his attention for a while, folks.”

The president and his Republican allies point to record low unemployment to claim that American workers have never done better, and that the president deserves re-election.

By retweeting dozens of Twitter messages purporting to be from active or retired firefighters who said they support him, Trump was exploiting a Democratic vulnerability with organized labor: While union leaders almost exclusively endorse Democrats, many rank-and-file members vote Republican.

The Trump 2016 candidacy exposed this discrepancy. Internal polling released by the AFL-CIO showed Trump won 3% more union voters than the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, while Clinton’s union support slipped by 10% compared to Obama in 2012.

Union workers, especially in industrial fields, have defected from their historic allegiance to Democrats over social issues like gun rights and abortion, and in 2016 Trump won many of their votes while promising to crack down on trade deals and illegal immigration.

But Russo said the ardor for Trump by blue-collar workers appears to be diminishing in places like northeast Ohio, where the economic picture has worsened.

In March, Trump seemed to blame the president of a United Auto Workers local in Lordstown, Ohio, for a decision last year by General Motors to close an assembly plant there. Trump posted on Twitter that the union president “ought to get his act together and produce.”

A few days before Biden visited Pittsburgh, workers at ATI Allegheny Ludlum’s steel mill in nearby Washington, Pennsylvania, had mixed reactions to the president’s economic performance. In 2017 Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel to boost American jobs, but the record is mixed.

Chad Martin, a 36-year-old steelworker, heading from the parking lot to clock in for the swing shift, dismissed Biden’s message that he was labor’s best friend. “That’s old-school thought,” he said. “That’s what my dad thinks. He’s a Democrat.” Martin said he became a Republican in his 20s when “I started thinking for myself.”

It was clear that many other rank-and-file workers also support the president. A worker named Mark, who declined to provide his full name, used an expletive to describe Trump, but said he was doing a good job. “He can’t keep his mouth shut,” he said. “But look at the economy. I just started working here three months ago, I’m making the best money of my life.”

But Clark Jungo, 59, an inspector, said the Trump tariffs had hurt. “We do specialty steel here,” he said. “And it worked against us.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="ced8ff78-018f-32da-a562-9eb3dd555a31" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/joe-biden-trump-unions.html">The New York Times</a>.

As Biden woos labor, Trump uses a Twitter barrage to stake his own claim

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Trip Gabriel and Jonathan Martin

Articles written by the author

As Biden Woos Labor, Trump Uses a Twitter Barrage to Stake His Own Claim

Steve King Loses House Committee Seats Over White Supremacy Remark

Steve King Loses House Committee Seats Over White Supremacy Remark

As Biden woos labor, Trump uses a Twitter barrage to stake his own claim