Fresh off his victory tour of lying about how many jobs he saved in Indiana, Donald Trump found time Wednesday to attack the president of United Steelworkers 1999, Chuck Jones, for calling his bluff. Trump's deal had saved 800 Carrier jobs, not 1,100-plus, and Jones had the nerve to correct Trump, eliciting two nasty tweets from Trump about what "a terrible job" Jones was doing representing Carrier employees.
But when it came time for Trump to stick up for tens of thousands of American steelworkers, he couldn't spare a second. He just sat by and watched congressional Republicans strip the "Buy America" provision from a water bill that would have required infrastructure projects to use American steel.
Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown even organized a tweet storm with other senators to alert Trump and ask him to intervene, but they got no response. Zip. Not a peep from the self-styled billionaire champion of the working man.
"If tax dollars are being spent for a project, they ought to be buying American iron and steel made by American workers," Brown told MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Wednesday. "That's sort of fundamental. Trump failed his first test, Ryan failed another test in protecting American workers."
This was an easy get. The "Buy America" provision was already included in the Senate version of the water bill and had passed with bipartisan support. GOP Speaker Paul Ryan stripped it out when the House and Senate versions of the bill were being reconciled.
If Trump cared about anything other than stroking his own ego with a headline, he could have reached out to Ryan and said, "Don't do that. There's a new sheriff in town and we're going to defend the jobs of American workers—that's the platform I won on and that's got to be our priority."
But instead, Trump found time to criticize a union guy who was forced in good conscience to call B.S. on Trump's inflated numbers. That’s probably because Trump has always preferred Chinese steel.
Check out Sen. Brown’s interview below about the GOP screwing American steel workers.
