Richard Trumka, the president of the nation’s largest labor union, the AFL-CIO, told reporters Wednesday morning that he has no regrets about quitting the Trump administration’s manufacturing committee in the wake of the president’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, and blasted the White House as a combination of people who are “racist” and “Wall Streeters.”
“You had two factions in the White House,” he said. “You had one faction who actually aligned with the policies that we would have supported on trade and infrastructure, but they turned out to be racist. On the other hand, you had people who weren’t racist, but they were Wall Streeters. The Wall Streeters began to dominate the administration and have moved his agenda back to everything he fought against in the election.”
Though he didn’t name names, Trumka’s categorization aligns with others who have described the White House as a battle between “nationalists” like the now-ousted Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and “globalists” like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council chair Gary Cohn.
Asked with which faction Trump himself belongs to, Trumka quipped: “On which day?” He later added that the president has not demonstrated that he has a “strong agenda he actually believes in.”
Trumka said he was willing to work with the President Trump on policies that could benefit workers, but Trump’s “spirited defense of white nationalists and neo-Nazis” after Charlottesville was the final straw.
