With just a few exceptions — the Teamsters being one of them — organized labor is almost uniformly Democratic in its politics. The question of union political influence is usually just one of how much help they can be to Democrats.
In the 2016 election, the AFL-CIO was 100 percent behind Hillary Clinton in the general election. Its president, Richard Trumka, denounced Trump as a "bigot," and had quite a few other things to say about him.
"Trump's been very, very anti-union," he told Soledad O'Brien's YouTube channel Matter of Fact. "Donald Trump's policies and his bigotry and his outrageousness are going to derail Donald Trump," he predicted. He called Trump's agenda "more bigoted than bold, and more condescending than comprehensive."
And now...well, his tone is suddenly a little different. Not only has he been praising Donald Trump's second-choice nominee for the Department of Labor, he's also offering qualified praise for his infrastructure plan on television this morning:
"A trillion dollars is the right magnitude to be talking about," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said on Fox Business Network the day after Trump called for the spending package in his first address to Congress. "We think it's more. The Society of American Civil Engineers think it's more like $3 trillion."
"He's talking in the right ballpark," Trumka added. "Infrastructure, it's a three or four-time winner for all of us."
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