'Donald Trump is incapable of running anything': Union slams Trump in new ad

At a White House meeting in January of 2017, the head of North America’s building trades unions praised then President Donald Trump for committing to improve the lives of Labor workers. We just had probably the most incredible meeting of our careers with the President and the Vice President and the senior staff, when the President laid out his plans about how he’s going to handle trade, how he’s going to invest in our infrastructure, and how he’s going to level the playing field for construction workers and all Americans across this country. And then took the time to take everyone into the Oval Office and show them the seat of power in the world. The respect that the President of the United States just showed us. And when he shows it to us, he shows that the three million of our members in the United States was nothing short of incredible. Well, that was then and this is now. And it’s one thing to say something. It’s another thing to do it. Fast forward to today, where the NABTU is endorsing President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign and launching a nationwide effort to keep Trump from ever returning to the White House. In a statement and an accompanying video, the group’s president, Sean Mcgarvey, says Trump broke those promises he made to union leaders when he first took office. You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody except for day one, Donald Trump. He’s not a good man. He’s not a good person. He does not care about anybody in this world except Donald Trump. That’s it. That’s all very clear and present. Now he’s looking to get in that position again to exert revenge on people. I go all the way back to the 80s with Donald Trump and him trying to, you know, get his mug on Page Six of the New York Post. The only difference between the Donald Trump of the 80s and the Donald Trump of today is he feels totally free to let his dark side out. And his dark side is very, very dark and very, very dangerous for this country. We can’t let our democracy that we’ve worked for and we’ve cherished, it’s just disintegrate with the wrong leader and at the wrong time. I can tell you that he personally committed to me that he was going to get our pensions fixed. He understood who was affected by these pensions. He assured me I’m the president of the United States. I’ll just call Mitch. I’ll tell him to put it in the bill. Is everybody going to love me? Everybody loves me, right? Is everybody going to love me? Yes. Mr. President, you fixed the pension. Everybody’s going to love you. That was wasted breath. There was lots of other things put in that bill. There was tax cuts put in that bill for rich people. Donald Trump promised infrastructure every year. Infrastructure is the easiest of all. Donald Trump was not interested in any of the policy that actually goes along with being president of the United States. Trump was interested in the pomp and circumstance, the plane, the helicopter. It’s all about him. Donald Trump is incapable of running anything, let alone the most powerful country in the history of the world. And God help us if he gets anywhere near that White House in the future. And Sean Mcgarvey joins us now. Thank you very much for coming on the show this morning. That was a pretty powerful video and a real turn around from when you first endorsed former President Trump or at least listened to him and hoped that his promises would come true. What do you say to hard working Americans who don’t have time to, you know, clue in on every detail of every trial he’s involved with or every promise he made who support Trump almost blindly? But they, they, they connect with him, even members of your union. What do you say to them about who this man is? Well, quite honestly, we’re not going to waste a lot of time talking to every American that supports Donald Trump. And we’re not going to waste a lot of time with some of our members that support Donald Trump because we’re not going to change their minds. What we’re going to concentrate on is the 10 to 15% of our members who we can have a conversation with and explain to them the facts, give them the projects that they’re actually working on, the way they’re feeding their family today. You know how that project came about. It came about through three monumental pieces of legislation after he saved our pensions that are now creating the biggest infrastructure boom this country has ever seen. We call it the infrastructure generation that Joe Bidens creating and in our opinion, it’s the only time in history we can compare to is when the GIS came back from saving the world from tyranny in World War 2 and came back to build the middle class in their own lives after they saved the world. That’s kind of the scale that we’re at right now with the most pro union president that this country, pro worker president that this country has ever seen. So that’s the conversations that we’re having. We’ll have them one-on-one, we’ll have them in the key States and we’ve got months and months. We’ve already started and we’re already we’re already laying out the facts and we see the results. Sean, good morning. It’s Willie Geisten. We’re looking at this list of other unions that have endorsed the president. You are not alone in your support for him and the messes that you put out there. As you say in that ad, it became a punch line through the Trump years that it was infrastructure week, that he was about to get to infrastructure, that he was going to spend that trillion dollars. He promised you he was going to spend an infrastructure which never came. And then you get to November of 2021, President Biden is in the White House, a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that went out the door. And that money, you can see the signs all over the country. So when you say that Joe Biden is the most pro union, pro worker president in history, that is a huge claim. What makes you say that? Well, we can say that by not only the pieces of legislation that he passed by, but the language that’s in the legislation that assures that those jobs will be good middle class family sustaining jobs. From the manufacturing jobs that we’re rebuilding in this country via the CHIPS and Science Act to the construction jobs where we have the prerequisite Labor Standards in involved in those jobs via the regulatory work that’s been done, following up what was passed in the legislation. So we know that these are going to be good middle class family sustaining jobs and my members are going to have many, many of those jobs. MSNBC contributor Mike Barnacle joins the table now and he has the next question. Mike, Sean, that was a pretty good definitive outline of Donald Trump that you had in that spot that we just watched. You clearly know the members of your unions, the building and trades unions around the country. But tell me, what’s your instinct? Why do so many of the union members that you represent still seem to have a cultural hold on Donald Trump, still seem to want to vote for him? What is the deal with them? Well, I, I, I think quite honestly that my membership reflects the country. So that base of support that Donald Trump has that that 25 or 30% of people that would would stay with him for whatever reason are going to stay with him. And that quite honestly to us in our history doesn’t matter. I to a winning or losing candidate, what matters is the 15% of people that are persuadable that are open to hearing the facts and making up their own mind with them and their family around their kitchen table and saying, you know what? Our lives of definitively change for the better because of the work that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have done. And and we’re going to change our mind and how we vote this time. Forget about all the baggage, all the rhetoric, all the threats. And also, you know, a lot of our members are patriots and they do not like the the, the way that this president, ex president is talking about what he’s going to do if he’s elected to another term. You know, we’re, we’re believe it or not, we’re capitalists and we’re patriots, OK. And we want what’s best for this country and not just for the building trades for the whole of the country. And we know that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have led us out of the wilderness through the pandemic, created unbelievable opportunity like we haven’t seen since World War 2. And it’s affecting the pocketbooks of our members, families at their kitchen tables. And they’re going to make a different decision now.