Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, used her keynote address at the union’s national convention on Thursday to attack U.S. President Donald Trump and urge members to help Democrats retake Congress, as delegates prepared to debate multiple anti-Israel resolutions.
“Remember that warning—about the barbarians at the gate? Well, the barbarians aren’t at the gate; they are inside, including at the highest levels of government,” she said on stage at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. “The president and his cronies are abusing government powers to punish political opponents. Every day, they find new ways to attack voting, presumably to entrench themselves.”
She criticized Trump’s education policies, immigration enforcement and tariffs, as well as what she pronounced was the president’s “costly war against Iran that has left us worse than when it started.”
Weingarten told attendees that the AFT is launching a “Democracy Defenders election protection program” to recruit 5,000 members to protect voters’ rights and that the union is committing “to our most ambitious election program ever.”
She said the teachers’ union could “build what Martin Luther King Jr. called the ‘beloved community'—an America where hate has no home. Where the trans nurse, the Palestinian teacher, the Jewish student and every person regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender or place of origin, feels welcome, safe and valued.”
The remarks come as delegates to the convention gather to vote on resolutions and amendments to the union’s constitution, including multiple anti-Israel resolutions. In footage from the convention, some delegates can be seen wearing keffiyehs.
Corey DeAngelis, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of The Parent Revolution, told JNS that “Randi Weingarten’s speech at the AFT convention had nothing to do with improving student outcomes.” He stated that “her unhinged performance showed everyone that the teachers’ union has become little more than a money-laundering operation for socialist politicians.”
He said he had read “every page of the 200-plus pages of resolutions the union is considering in Washington this week” and that they seem more like “a declaration of war on the Trump administration” than any serious education agenda.
“One resolution calls for abolishing ICE. Another demands cutting the military budget by at least 50 percent,” he told JNS. “Yet another explicitly calls for a national march on Washington to impeach, convict and remove President Trump from office before the November midterms.”
DeAngelis said, “Randi Weingarten is behaving more like a cult leader than an educator. Her increasingly unhinged rhetoric is the best free advertising homeschooling and school choice could ask for. No sane parent wants someone this radical and disconnected from reality teaching their children.”
Delegates will review the proposed amendments and resolutions, then debate them in committee sessions before final floor votes later in the convention.
