“DID you ever think you’d see a president who knows how much concrete and rebar you can lay down in a single day?” Addressing an annual gathering of North America’s Building Trades Unions, in Washington, DC, on April 4th, Donald Trump felt at home. The assembled union bosses, mostly burly white men squeezed into business suits but plumbers and pipe-fitters at heart, were like the men he learned his world view from, working on his father’s construction sites in Brooklyn and Queens. “I had the support”, he supposed, harking back to last year’s election, “of almost everybody in this room.”
Manly guffaws and boos rippled around the auditorium. The building trades endorsed the president’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and most of its bosses voted for her. (“It’s arrogant of him to say we voted for him,” muttered a delegate from Ohio. “We didn’t.”) Yet Mr Trump had been invited in part because many of their members, charmed by his talk of protectionism, new infrastructure and jobs, did vote for him. Exit polls suggest he won 43% of voters from union households, the best result for a Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984. And in a few midwestern states, he...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2nhm91r
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