Panicked Union Establishment Launches Anti-Trump Campaign To Squash Member Support Of Populist Billionaire

Controversial presidential-candidate Donald Trump has garnered a lot of enemies from within the Republican Party and, as well, the union establishment.
Even as billionaires recently convened a semi-secret meeting at a posh island resort to plot to take down Trump, union bosses have launched a campaign to stomp out growing union member support of Trump.

On Tuesday, AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka sent out an email to union members stating Trump is “full of baloney and bluster” and asking them to sign an anti-Trump petition.

In addition, according to the Washington Post, the labor federation who largely supports (but has not yet endorsed) Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton will be focusing its vast resources on member-to-member engagement.

The campaign will be focused on grassroots contact with union members and potential Democrats to argue that Trump wants to cut workers’ wages and that his immigration and unionization policies would leave them worse off than they are today.

In large measure, the anti-Trump initiative is in response to growing union member support of Trump’s populist positions on immigration, jobs, and trade.

“If left unattended, the anger and the frustration [Trump has] tapped into will carry the day,” Trumka warned Monday in an interview with the Washington Post. “But when you give working-class people the facts, I think he falls apart. He’s a house of cards.”
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“We’ll have literally millions of phone calls, leaflets, door knocks, rallies and seminars,” Trumka said.

In January, left-wing SEIU boss Mary Kay Henry told David Axlerod that she was “deeply concerned” that Trump’s message was resonating with many of her union’s two million members.

“Sixty-four percent of our public members identify as conservative, and are much more interested in the Republican debate than the Democratic debate at the moment,” she admitted.
“Our white conservative membership that we hear is responding to Trump’s appeal are more concentrated in the Midwest and the South,” she said.

Like the AFL-CIO (which the SEIU not part of), Ms. Henry’s union has launched an anti-Trump campaign with its members.

“We’re doing one-on-ones with every one of our members right now,” said Henry.
“We’re going into hyperdrive, especially in the pockets of our membership that have a lot of Muslim leaders to stand against what is being said” by Trump, she said.

With attacks coming from both Washington’s GOP and union establishment, it is unknown whether Trump’s message will be dampered or whether his ascendancy to the GOP nomination will be stopped.
Related: Key GOP fundraiser: Donors will fall in line behind Trump