WASHINGTON _ The nation's most powerful labor union chief, still reeling from Democrats' big losses in 2016, has a message for them as they work to win back working people.
"Calling the president names, even if they're accurate, gets you nowhere," Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, told reporters Wednesday at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
Trumka, reared in one of the Pennsylvania coal towns that President Donald Trump swept in the election, said that telling voters who supported him that they were stupid to do so is also a strategy for failure. Instead, he said, Democrats need to make the case to those who gave him the benefit of the doubt that Trump has not done what he promised.
"He hasn't done any of these 'do this and do that,'" Trumka said.
Even as the labor chieftain cautioned against name-calling, he was not averse to criticizing Trump's administration as he recounted his struggle to find common ground with the populists in the White House.
"The difficulty that you had was you had two factions in the White House," Trumka said. "You had one faction that actually had some of the policies that we would have supported on trade and infrastructure but they turned out to be racist. On the other, you had people that weren't racist. But they were Wall Street."
Trumka, who was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, faulted the Democratic nominee for not delivering a "kitchen table message" to win over working-class voters. He also distanced organized labor from her defeat: "I wasn't running. The union wasn't running. It was him and Hillary."
After the election, Trumka met several times with administration officials and was named to a White House advisory council on manufacturing. But he recently left the council, along with its corporate members, in protest of Trump's handling of the racial violence in Charlottesville, Va., and the president dissolved it.
