Despite strong condemnations of the Trump administration for what he calls the “growing wage inequality” among Americans, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka on Wednesday refused to rule out his union endorsing President Donald Trump for re-election in 2020.

“Well, he will be looked at [for the labor endorsement],” Trumka told Newsmax, “Everyone [of the presidential candidates] will be looked at.”

Pressed as to how serious he was about the AFL-CIO considering not endorsing the Democratic nominee for president for the first time since 1972, Trumka insisted “we will consider every candidate who’s running in 2020.”

Recalling the last presidential race, the union chief pointed out that “Trump got 3 percent more of our members than [Republican nominee Mitt] Romney did in 2012, but Hillary Clinton, unfortunately for her, got 10 percent less of our members than Obama did in 2012. And some didn’t vote for President or some voted third party.”

Trump gained among union members, Trumka felt, “because people were mad. They were looking for someone who was going to change the economy. They felt there were assaults on their health care and assaults on their pensions. People were looking for someone who will shake up the status quo, because the economy wasn’t working for them. Their wages were flattened and they found that candidate in Donald Trump.”

Trump, Trumka said, “promised to lift up workers and reign in Wall Street.”

Nearly all of Trump’s promises to help working people, Trumka insisted, “were either broken or unfulfilled. It doesn’t matter if the GDP is great and unemployment is at 3.9 percent”

He did add, however, that Trump “is going in the right direction on trade and [the AFL-CIO] totally supports a rewrite of NAFTA.”

Trumka, who was just re-elected to his 3rd term as head of America’s largest union, spoke to a press breakfast in Washington hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.



