The leader of the second biggest union in the United States says she and her members are getting ready to do battle against Donald Trump. Politico reports that the president of the Service Employees International Union told a key Obama operative, the fight is coming:

In an interview with David Axelrod on his podcast "The Axe Files" out Thursday, Mary Kay Henry said her organization is going into “hyperdrive” to stand up against Trump because she sees him as a real threat. Story Continued Below

Henry compared Trump to former California Gov. Pete Wilson who supported Proposition 226, a measure strongly opposed by unions that would have required them to get approval from individual members to spend their dues on political campaigns.  

SEIU represents nearly 2 million workers in the US and Canada, mostly working in areas such as healthcare, the public service and the service industry. The vow to get involved in the election campaign is not a new one for SEIU, one of the key backers of Barack Obama's campaigns.

Henry admitted that while the union bosses at the SEIU back Democrats, her members are more interested in Republican politics and many are drawn to Trump:

“I think he’s touching this vein of the terrible anxiety that working-class people feel about their current status, but more importantly, how terrified they are for their kids not being able to do as well as they have, never mind doing better,” Henry said. “ You know, so that broken sense of the future and that emotion having an easier appeal to fear than to what’s possible is what we found is why — we’re doing one-on-ones with every one of our members right now in this period because 64 percent of our public members identify as conservative and are much more interested in the Republican debate than the Democratic debate at this moment.”  

Unions are one of the biggest funders of politics in America with large donations, almost exclusively given to Democrats, and far in excess of what Republicans receive from corporate America.