Teamsters president Sean O’Brien accused then-Vice President Kamala Harris of pressuring his union for an endorsement Tuesday, recounting a tense meeting in which she allegedly said the union “better get on board.”
O’Brien spoke with The Free Press founder and editor Bari Weiss on her “Honestly” podcast about who truly represents the American working class in a shifting political landscape.
He described one off-putting encounter a Teamsters leader had with the 2024 presidential candidate in a photo op line:
“So, Joan goes in the line and Joan says, ‘I’m Joan Corey. I’m a vice president with the Teamsters Union,’ and [Harris] pointed her finger at Joan and said, ‘Teamsters better get on board,’ and so Joan says, ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Yeah, Teamsters better get on board. I don’t know why you haven’t endorsed me yet.’ So she comes back, and she tells me this, and I’m like, ‘The nerve!’”
O’Brien, who has criticized the Democratic Party in the past, went on to claim that when Harris met with the union’s executive board, which had prepared a slate of 16 questions, she only answered four questions.
“She really didn’t answer the questions, and then on the fourth question my chief of staff slides me an index card and says, ‘This is the last question. She’s not answering anymore,’ because she wanted to, like, pontificate and give her speech of why the country is the way it is, why we should endorse her.”
O’Brien paraphrased her closing as essentially telling the union leadership, “‘Listen, I’m going to win with you or without you.’”
“And it was like such a smug answer, like, okay, and that turned the majority of the people in that room off her,” he said. O’Brien then described their postmortem of the meeting, noting that many in the union leadership were turned off by Harris’ smug demeanor and body language.
“You could smell it a mile away,” he said.
The Teamsters declined to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential race, a move that sparked internal and external criticism.
“Once we announced that there was going to be no endorsement, that’s when all the keyboard warriors came out and the attacks from the DSA and, you know, my friends that were allegedly my friends that were, you know, high-ranking senators of the Democratic Party,” he said. “Once I spoke at the RNC, then I was, you know, no good.”
Harris didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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