Story highlights
Trump is looking to attract union members, who have traditionally voted Democratic.
The Teamsters have faced internal criticism for the meeting with the former president.
Biden earned a key labor endorsement last week from the United Auto Workers.
Former President Donald Trump will meet Wednesday with Teamsters union leaders and members in Washington as his campaign tries to drive a wedge between President Joe Biden and one of his most loyal constituencies: organized labor.
Trump has made appealing to union members, a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, a key part of his strategy for winning over working-class voters, especially in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – all three of which broke for Biden in the 2020 election after backing Trump four years earlier.
Trump’s meeting with the Teamsters follows a private get-together he had four weeks ago with the union’s leader, Sean O’Brien, at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort that rankled some prominent union members and the group’s rank-and-file. Wednesday’s gathering, at the group’s headquarters, has also touched off some angry dissent inside the union, with one executive board member in a letter to O’Brien denouncing Trump as “a known union buster, scab, and insurrectionist.”
“As a United States Army Veteran, I cannot support a draft dodger, and traitor who deliberately undermines the Constitution of the United States,” wrote John Palmer, the group’s international vice president at-large, who has refused to attend the meeting. “We should never entertain dialogue with a candidate with such an anti-union record.”
Under O’Brien, the union, which represents an estimated 1.3 million workers – nearly a third of them employed by UPS, with which they agreed to…
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