You cannot make this up. But the Donald Trump Department of Labor can.
Today, during remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta announced that U.S. President Ronald Reagan will be inducted into the U.S. Department of Labor Hall of Honor.
President Reagan is the only president of the United States to have led a major union. President Reagan’s membership in the Labor Hall of Honor recognizes his accomplishments as a labor leader. During a March 30, 1981, speech to the National Conference of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, President Reagan remarked: "I hope you'll forgive me if I point with some pride to the fact that I'm the first president of the United States to hold a lifetime membership in an AFL-CIO union."
“Well before he led this nation, Ronald Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild during its first three strikes,” Secretary Acosta said. “As President of the Screen Actors Guild, President Reagan negotiated never-before-seen concessions for SAG members, which included residual payments and health and pension benefits. As President of this nation, Ronald Reagan continued to recognize the contributions of unions to a free society. His support for Solidarity in Poland prompted a flourishing of freedom that ultimately led to the collapse of Communism.”
Reagan was indeed the president of the Screen Actors Guild—during the height of McCarthyism and Hollywood blacklisting, during which he appeared as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, testifying that a “small clique” of communists were indeed attempting to “be a disruptive influence” inside the union he led. Going farther, he was also an FBI informer who provided the agency with names of actors in the union he believed to be subversives.
As president, Ronald Reagan was instrumental in crippling the labor movement in the United States; his dissolution of the union representing U.S. air traffic controllers and firing of the majority of those workers became the new gospel among private companies facing strikes of their own, a path made far easier by Reagan's appointment of multiple anti-union members to the National Labor Relations Board and their subsequent pro-employer decisions—including the slow-walking of investigations into illegal activities by employers to cripple unions and their workers, thus making it more profitable to break unions and pay the resulting small fines, years later, than to negotiate with them.
Orwell would be proud. Or, perhaps, peeved.