Separated at Birth

Mulgrew and Trump--the GOP and Unity

It’s been a very troubling year. I’ve seen two Presidents re-elected, Donald Trump and Michael Mulgrew. Neither was my choice, but both got more votes than their opponents this time. These two Presidents would profess little love for one another. Yet—they’re similar in many ways.

For one, they both demand loyalty. Trump, for example, fires people when he doesn’t care for their conclusions. When economic data came back that made his programs look bad, he fired the bearer of bad tidings. When Amy Arundell, who was extraordinary at her job, determined that Mulgrew was misleading our union, he fired her too. (So much for tolerating diverse points of view.)

When we look at Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” we can’t help but notice that it’s defunding Medicaid (not to mention food assistance for those in need). Trump’s people will claim that’s not true, and that they’re simply requiring people to work in order to receive it. However, if you watch this John Oliver piece, you’ll see that the new model is based on introducing so much red tape you’re likely to lose Medicaid no matter how much you work.

This reminds me of nothing so much as Unity’s campaign stunt last year. To compensate for introducing co-pays to UFT Medicare recipients who already pay significant premiums, they took SHIP, a program to help retirees, and offered limited compensation for the co-pays they forced upon us. Just like Medicaid, SHIP was a very good program before this. But to enable this, Unity made getting refunds so complicated and redundant that it may not be worth the bother.

I’ve now signed up for three MyChart programs, and thus far only one is giving me the info I need. Should I spend hours making tedious calls and figure out how to get my hundred bucks back? Or should I wait and hope that, eventually, I see some doctor in one MyChart program seven times?

President Trump is now asking Texas to gerrymander the state so they gain five more GOP members of Congress. He wants other red states to do the same. This, of course, would disenfranchise a whole lot of Americans who don’t subscribe to the GOP agenda. Of course, blue states could reciprocate. I see that as a lose-lose.

Michael Mulgrew’s Unity Caucus is right there with manipulating both votes and voter turnout. Unity has been “studying” online voting for the last decade or two. Humiliatingly low turnout, though, has won them office over and over. Why mess with a good thing by actually encouraging member participation? When asked to enable online voting, they once again claimed to be studying the issue. Perhaps in another hundred years, if we still can’t vote them out, they’ll conclude it’s too risky.

That, of course, did not stop them from enabling in-person voting in places they knew to be populated largely by Unity members. Everyplace Unity members worked had in-person voting. Your school? Nah. Too risky, even though it was perfectly fine to not only vote on contracts there, but also have your chapter leader single-handedly bring all ballots to the Post Office.

If that isn’t enough to demonstrate manipulation, Unity has been punishing high school teachers, for decades, for the offense of electing a non-Unity member Vice President way back in the eighties. As soon as they got rid of the non-Unity VP, they changed the rules so that all members voted for all VPs. This means elementary teachers, who not only outnumber us, but also tend to vote largely for Unity, help us choose our VP.

This is tantamount to having Texas and Oklahoma help choose Governors for New York and California. I hope Donald Trump isn’t reading this. As far as manipulation elections, he’s way behind Unity. And hey, remember January 6th? When a non-Unity member won HS VP, Unity not only refused to seat him, but also called a new election. (They lost that one by a wider margin, hence the new rule making sure HS teachers could no longer choose their reps.)

I’ve heard multiple accounts of their doing the same in chapter leader elections. In fact, the first time I ran and won as chapter leader, I nominated four delegates. Curiously, the Unity chapter leader saw fit to place only two on the ballot. He asked at an assembly whether there were any volunteers to fill the slots, and my two nominees stood.

Days later, he came back and said they could not be seated, and there had to be a vote. When I complained to UFT, I was told that if I persisted, they would have to call an entirely new election, and I’d have to run for chapter leader again. My nominees ran, but there was also a very good friend of mine and a teacher who shared my last name on the ballot. Neither had asked to run, and no one had asked them whether they wanted to. My nominees prevailed, but the creepy and crooked process left a bad taste in my mouth.

Trump’s also big on changing the subject these days. He doesn’t love talking about those Epstein files. They were gonna be released, but now they are irrelevant, or written by Obama, or don’t exist, or something, and instead we should focus on whatever Trump sees fit.

For the last few years, I’ve been pretty focused on protecting Medicare for myself, my wife, and my brother and sister city retirees. If you’re a regular reader, you know I see hypocrisy in Unity’s claiming to oppose Medicare Advantage while lobbying against 1096, which would not only protect real Medicare for us, but also make the absurd, Sysiphian SHIP co-pay reimbursements unnecessary.

At a recent RTC meeting, a Unity member got up and praised Bennett Fischer for talking about Trump. The member seemed to suggest Trump ought to be our prime topic. Of course, what I took from that is that Unity is tired of being reminded about how they sold us out on Medicare (not to mention how they continue to sell us out on 1096).

That, too, is similar to what Trump and the GOP do. They swore up and down they were protecting Medicaid, and still do, despite clear, imminent and draconian cuts. Unity will claim they’ll protect Medicare for us, yet fight tooth and nail for the right to negotiate it away the moment we turn our heads.

Another thing Trump is famous for is threatening lawsuits. Trump threatened CBS with one because he didn’t like the way 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris interview. CBS, of course, is part of Paramount. Rather than endanger their eminent merger with Skydance, they paid Trump 16 million. ABC also paid him off, and billionaire Bezos had the Washington Post pull an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

Unity uses legal intimidation as well, though they haven’t had remotely the same success. They unsuccessfully sued Daniel Alicea over using “UFT Members” to name a site frequented by UFT members. They also threatened me with civil and criminal penalties for exercising my First Amendment right to parody Michael Mulgrew. While I did not accede to their demands, shortly after I publicly responded my domain, nyceducator.com, no longer linked to my former blog.

I strongly suspect Unity sent a cease and desist to Blogger, which then hosted me, but I have no confirmation. A UFT officer told me he didn’t think their lawyers would do that, but did not directly deny it either. The demonstrated behavior of these lawyers, as far as I’m concerned, suggested to me at least that yes, they absolutely would do that.

Recently, we read that Trump sent the National Guard to DC because some guy from DOGE named “Big Balls” got beaten up. Trump doesn’t want DC’s police force to control DC, and evidently Trump can overrule the elected mayor. Elections seem a nuisance to Trump, just as they are to Unity. Otherwise, why would Unity have halted elections for District Representatives, choosing Whoever They Want instead?

Finally, this whole thing reminds me of how cults run. Trump can insult the wife and father of Ted Cruz, but retain his complete loyalty. Vance compared Trump to Hitler, but now adores him unreservedly. Trump can call Rubio “Little Marco” yet still appoint him Secretary of State. There’s no consistency. There’s no real loyalty. But you have to act like there is or get a real job.

It’s the same with Mulgrew. Everyone says how wonderful he is. It’s a good idea because he fires people not only for questioning his autocracy, but also for simply being friends with people he dislikes. I wonder, for example, how many of his staff question the UFT endorsement of Mamdani. I’d bet there are many.

If there are, however, they’re more concerned with keeping out of dreaded classrooms (where those of us who really do the work are found) than they are with principles. But Unity and MAGA are both cults. As such, their leaders can do no wrong. When they inevitably do wrong, the cults go into total denial mode.

We deserve representative leadership, and we certainly aren’t getting it. This year, Unity won its lowest margin ever, by far. We need to make sure that trend continues. We also need to retain RTC leadership. If we don’t, it’s gonna be just that much tougher to topple the Patronage Cult.

Thanks to Daniel A.