The building trade unions love Trump

Big Labor may have been With Her, but the unions that represent builders and pavers Love Him.

“We have a common bond with the president,” said Sean McGarvey, the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, after meeting on Monday with Mr. Trump and hearing him promise a major push to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. “We come from the same industry. He understands the value of driving development, moving people to the middle class.”

If the labor movement divides over Mr. Trump, it would not be the first time. An old saying holds that the building trades would pave over their mothers’ graves if it created jobs. And before Mr. Trump’s rise, unions like the Communications Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union had split with the building unions over the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, with the former siding with liberal environmentalists and the latter seeing opportunities for work.

In this case, the unions may unite with Democrats behind the new president — leaving Republican spending hawks in the cold.

Defense secretary seeks to reassure NATO chief

On his first working day as the country’s new secretary of defense, James N. Mattis spoke with the head of NATO and told him that the United States depends on it and on Europe for trans-Atlantic security.

The telephone conversation came just a week after Mr. Mattis’s boss, Mr. Trump, called NATO “obsolete,” because, Mr. Trump said, the alliance hasn’t done enough to combat terrorism.

Mr. Mattis “wanted to place the call on his first full day in office to reinforce the importance he places on the alliance,” a Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis, said in a statement on Monday night.