Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tore into President Trump on Monday while speaking before a crowd of labor organizers, arguing that Trump is a “pathological liar” who “works night and day on behalf of his fellow billionaires.”
Sanders told those gathered for an AFL-CIO Labor Day breakfast in New Hampshire that Trump is trying to divide Americans for “cheap political reasons,” Politico reported.
“And most reprehensible, we have a president who is not doing what almost every president in American history has done — When you make it into the Oval Office, you understand you’ve got a sacred responsibility to bring the American people together,” Sanders said.
{mosads}The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate also went after Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the eve of his confirmation hearing, arguing Kavanaugh would be an “anti-worker justice.”
“We should call him out,” Sanders said of Kavanaugh, according to Politico.
Sanders praised the labor movement on Monday, saying Americans owe a “debt of gratitude” for their advocacy, the newspaper reported.
“The union movement today is the last line of resistance to the reactionary corporate agenda,” Sanders said.
Sanders’s comments at the AFL-CIO event follow a public battle between Trump and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
Trumka argued during an interview on Sunday that Trump has done more to harm workers than help them.
“He hasn’t come up with an infrastructure program that could put a lot of us back to work,” Trumka said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
“He overturned a regulation that would deny over 5 million overtime that they would’ve had. He overturned some health and safety regulations that will hurt us on the job.”
The labor chief added that the AFL-CIO keeps “trying to find areas where we can work with him.”
Trump celebrated Labor Day on Monday with a tweet saying, “The Worker in America is doing better than ever before.”
The president had also offered rare praise for labor unions in a Labor Day proclamation issued Friday night.
“We have kept our promise to always keep the White House door open to members and leaders of our country’s labor organizations,” Trump wrote.
The president on Monday went after Trumka’s comments, arguing that unions were performing poorly because a Democrat was in the top leadership position.
“Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, represented his union poorly on television this weekend,” Trump tweeted. “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!”