Trump feuds with Indiana union chief - Politico
The president-elect lashes out at a union leader after he accuses Trump of having 'lied his a-- off' about saving jobs.
President-elect Donald Trump has touched off his latest feud, sparring with a union chief in Indianapolis as he attempts to demonstrate to the American public how his deal-making prowess saved jobs of union members.
The fight escalated Wednesday night when Trump lashed out on Twitter after the union leader, Chuck Jones, accused the president-elect of lying about how many jobs he was saving at Carrier Air Conditioning's Indiana plants.
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"Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!" Trump tweeted at 7:41 p.m., following up with, "If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues."
Trump and his team have spent much of the last week celebrating the deal it cut with the parent company of Carrier to save hundreds of jobs that were set to move to Mexico. Trump visited the Indiana plant last week to celebrate, announcing that he and his team had saved more than 1,100 jobs from being outsourced. It was early evidence, Trump’s team claimed, that the president-elect would deliver on his campaign promises of protecting American workers.
But in reality, the deal with Carrier saved 730 jobs, not the 1,100 Trump triumphantly announced at the plants, leaving 550 people out of work. Jones, president of the union that represents the Carrier plant employees, called Trump out on that gap, telling The Washington Post on Tuesday that the president-elect “lied his ass off” in front of the blue-collar workers he promised to champion in the White House.
Jones followed that with an appearance on CNN Wednesday night, where he said Trump “ought to make sure he gets all the facts straight before he starts talking about what he's done.” That appeared to be enough to trigger Trump's rant on Twitter.
In a Thursday morning appearance on CNN, Jones was careful to say that he and his union members are “grateful” to Trump for saving the jobs that he did save. But he took issue with Trump telling Carrier employees at his victory lap stop there last week that 1,100 jobs would stay put when he either knew, or should have known, that the real number was much lower.
“He didn't tell the truth. He inflated the numbers and I called him out on it,” Jones said on CNN’s “New Day” Thursday morning. “You hear all the time how much of a skilled negotiator that he is. You know, he says about himself. So, I've been in a lot of negotiations as a union representative. So, I would have to assume that he sure as the world either knew the precise numbers or most certainly should have.”
Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer said Thursday morning on Fox News that Trump "wants the truth" out of his exchange with Jones, but then proceeded to cite the same inflated job-saving numbers that the president-elect used last week.
Spicer told "America's Newsroom" that, "You've got a thousand people that are gonna have a blessed holiday season, that are not worried about jobs, that get to spend this time with their family and friends, knowing that they have a job with good benefits. That should be something that's celebrated."
"And then you've got a union boss that goes out and fabricates how the story went down for no reason. He should be grateful for Mr. Trump and Gov. Pence's efforts to help save those jobs," Spicer continued. "Instead, the guy whose job it was to actually be advocating on behalf picks a fight with the president-elect, who went out of his way to advocate and fight for thousands of — a thousand people's jobs. ... I think Mr. Trump is never going to sit back and let someone take a shot falsely at him without responding."
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who mounted a failed effort to take over as House minority leader, quickly jumped to Jones' defense, writing to the president-elect on Twitter and demanding that he "quit slandering a steelworker 4 having guts to CORRECT your lies! His numbrs [sic] were right & yours, wrong!" Ryan, whose Ohio district includes Youngstown, a city badly hurt by the departure of manufacturing jobs, built his bid to be minority leader on refocusing Democrats on working class Americans who have historically voted for them but cast ballots for Trump last month.
Union leaders were quick to come to Jones’ defense, slamming the president-elect for going after a local labor official. The president of the United Steelworkers Union called Jones “a hero” and said he was “terribly disappointed” and “angry” with Trump. Other labor leaders, including officials from the AFL-CIO, Communications Workers of America and National Nurses United, joined in backing Jones as well.
“I would say that it’s quite unusual for a President-elect to target a local union president who is an elected leader of a nonprofit organization let alone a president-elect who is a billionaire targeting somebody who most of us consider a working class hero,” Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen said, noting that he knows Jones “pretty well.” “The idea that that’s somebody a billionaire president-elect is going to target is basically repulsive.”
Anthony Scaramucci, a financier who sits on the Trump transition team's executive committee, labeled Jones's public questioning of the president-elect as "unfair" and added that the business mogul has sought to send a message to unions and union leaders that he is on their side.
"The pushback from the union leader to the president-elect is sort of, he's trying to let them know: 'Hey, it's sort of unfair. I'm in there advocating on your behalf. I know you're in there advocating on the behalf of your union people as well, but we should be working together as opposed to knocking each other's heads,'" Scaramucci said. "I think if the union leader said: 'Hey, thank you. Where was President Obama when I needed him?' That probably would have been a better press release yesterday or two days ago when that happened."
Jones confirmed to “New Day” that he has received threats as a result of his feud with Trump, much like others who have feuded with the president-elect in the past. Over the summer, the then-Republican nominee attacked a federal judge of Hispanic descent, suggesting that his heritage would make him unable to rule fairly in a fraud case against his defunct real estate seminar program.
He also feuded publicly with a Muslim family whose son was killed as a soldier in Iraq, suggesting that their faith did not allow the mother to speak during the father’s powerful rebuke of Trump in his remarks at the Democratic National Convention. And in a bizarre flurry of early morning Twitter posts, Trump attacked a past winner of his Miss Universe beauty pageant, telling his followers, among other things, to check out a sex tape of her that apparently did not exist.
Jones said such threats, while perhaps greater in volume in recent days, are nothing new to him as a union boss and that he is not “overly upset about any of it.” Instead of attacking him, Jones said Trump should have attempted to defend his own promises at last week’s Carrier rally.
“He overreacted, President-elect Trump did,” Jones said. “And I would expect that if he was going to tweet something, he should come out and try to justify his numbers and try to justify when I called him out on that.”
Nolan D. McCaskill, Marianne Levine and Ted Hesson contributed to this report.
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