Donald Trump goes off the deep end about Labor Day

| 2:33 pm EDT September 3, 2018
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Donald Trump attacked war hero John McCain for being a war hero, so really, nothing is sacred anymore. It wasn’t surprising, then, that Trump has decided to spend Labor Day attacking labor unions. After all, Trump just took scheduled raises away from federal employees, and he’s done so much to harm employee rights in general, we’re not even going to list it all. But Trump’s rampage this morning nonetheless gave a few things away.

Here’s what Donald Trump tweeted early this morning: “Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, represented his union poorly on television this weekend. Some of the things he said were so against the working men and women of our country, and the success of the U.S. itself, that it is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly. A Dem!” Well, that was his second try, after he misspelled the word “against” and had to delete it again and try again several hours later. But then it got weird.

Shortly after Trump posted the above tweet, this appeared on his Twitter account: “Happy Labor Day! Our country is doing better than ever before with unemployment setting record lows. The U.S. has tremendous upside potential as we go about fixing some of the worst Trade Deals ever made by any country in the world. Big progress being made!” Wait a minute, those two messages are pretty incongruous, and aren’t even in the same writing style. Did Trump’s staff post this second, more conciliatory tweet to try to make up for Trump’s stupidly timed attack on the head of a prominent labor union?

As the morning went on Donald Trump tweeted “The Worker in America is doing better than ever before. Celebrate Labor Day!” Once again, he was trying to make Labor Day all about him. Then he (or his handlers) spent the day retweeting other pro-labor things. By attacking the AFL-CIO for partisan reasons on Labor Day, Trump made himself look bad in the eyes of everyone. Even many of his own supporters are union members. It’s almost as if Richard Trumka timed his comments to bait Trump into making this poorly timed mistake.