More adventures of a bully
Yesterday I posted about union leader Chuck Jones’s fact-checking of Trump’s claims about the Carrier jobs. From Danielle Paquette in the Washington Post two days ago:
Jones, president of the United Steelworkers 1999, which represents Carrier employees, felt optimistic when Trump announced last week that he’d reached a deal with the factory’s parent company, United Technologies, to preserve 1,100 of the Indianapolis jobs — until the union leader heard from Carrier that only 730 of the production jobs would stay and 550 of his members would lose their livelihoods, after all.
At the Dec. 1 meeting, where Trump was supposed to lay out the details, Jones hoped he would explain himself.
“But he got up there,” Jones said Tuesday, “and, for whatever reason, lied his ass off.”
Late last night Paquette reported a follow-up – another Trump on Twitter story:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/806660011904614408
Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!
If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2016
If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues
It’s fascinating, in a disquieting way, that the massive power imbalance doesn’t inhibit him.
Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.
“My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, ‘Well, I might not sleep much tonight.’ “
Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.
Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.
Carrier, he said, had agreed to preserve 800 production jobs in Indiana. (Carrier confirmed that number.) The union leader said Trump appeared to be taking credit for rescuing 350 engineering positions that were never scheduled to leave. Five hundred fifty of his members, he said, were still losing their jobs. And the company was still collecting millions of dollars in tax breaks.
And Trump finds it urgent to attack Jones on Twitter.
Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader’s phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you.
He wasn’t sure how these people found his number.
“Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”
“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I’ve heard everything from people who want to burn my house down or shoot me,” he added. “So I take it with a grain of salt and I don’t put a lot of faith in that, and I’m not concerned about it and I’m not getting anybody involved. I can deal with people that make stupid statements and move on.”
Brett Voorhies, president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO, called Jones after Trump’s tweet caught his eye. Jones, he said, had just left his office in Indianapolis, where he manages the needs of about 3,000 union members.
“This guy makes pennies for what he does,” Voorhies said. “What he has to put up with is just crazy. Now he’s just got the president-elect smearing him on Twitter.”
I dislike Donald Trump. I think he’s a very bad man.
Octavian he ain’t.
Yes, because this is what presidents do, right? They attack random citizens on social media. That’s the most important thing a president does, right? Totally presidential. /s
I wonder how many hours constitutional lawyers have spent poring over the small print since the election trying to find a ‘fit and proper person’ clause that surely must have occurred to the founders to include.
Sorry but can’t work up the sympathy for folks who, not having the sense in the face of the obvious, voted for what they thought they were going to get when anyone with their eyes open would know what was going to happen. This was their choice and now they are going to find out out what they actually picked. It isn’t only the politicians that have to be accountable. We all are going to suffer by these morons’ selections.
For his epitaph H.G. Wells proposed “God damn you all, I told you so.” But these words were not actually carved onto his headstone.
Based on what the Trump creature has been doing and will certainly go on doing (amply and dismayingly documented here), they can now serve for the original USA that struggled into life circa 1781, only to die on November 8, 2016. And, eventually, for the zombie counterfeit that has replaced it.
The massive power imbalance only proves that he is right! How would he have to to have power in the first place if he was in the habit of being wrong??!