Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election 147 days ago. He remains fixated on his win – and the fact no one saw it coming.
Speaking at the 2017 North America’s Building Trades Unions National Legislative Conference in Washington months after Election Day, Trump regaled the assembled union members with the story about his unlikely victory, something he has done at countless speeches before.
“They would say, ‘There’s no way to 270. You need 270. There’s no way to 270.’ I heard that so much. For a year, I kept saying maybe I shouldn’t be running,” Trump said, before ticking through the states he won, including unexpected victories in Michigan and Wisconsin.
“They came out of the blue, and we didn’t even need them – and we love those two states – because we won the state of Pennsylvania. And we won Ohio and Iowa and North Carolina and South Carolina and Florida, and so many others,” he said, to cheers.
It has become more likely than not that Trump will mention the 2016 campaign – and its unexpected victory – when he speaks to big crowds.
But on Tuesday, Trump may have misjudged his audience.
Standing before him were union members, from a host of unions that as entities didn’t actually support him in the 2016 campaign.
In fact, every national union associated with the group Trump addressed on Tuesday – including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, International Brotherhood of Teamsters and Laborers’ International Union of North America – either endorsed Clinton during the 2016 election or are members of a large union body, like the AFL-CIO, that did so.
So when Trump began to brag about having the support of everyone in the room, he heard from the vocal crowd, which had been largely appreciative during much of his address.
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“I had the support of, I would say, almost everybody in this room. We had tremendous support,” Trump said before a few boos began to grow from the audience. “No, we did. We had tremendous support. We had tremendous support.”
The President clearly heard the boos and reacted.
“Well, would you like to make a change, folks? Would you like to make a change? Because if anybody wants to make a change, you won’t have so many jobs, that I can tell you. Your jobs will be a whole different story,” he said.
