No, Ronald Reagan wasn’t the last union member on a ticket before Tim Walz

Tim Walz may be serving as Minnesota’s governor and running to become vice president, but when giving speeches, he enjoys dusting off his old union card from his days as a high school teacher and coach.

As a teacher in Minnesota, Walz belonged to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. 

"I happen to be the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan," he said in an Aug. 13 speech to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Los Angeles.

He repeated this claim more recently, in a Sept. 21 appearance in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when he said that "the last union member on a national ticket (was) Ronald Reagan."

Walz has used this as a setup for the punchline that he will continue to be a loyal friend to labor, unlike Reagan, who took antiunion actions in his subsequent career in politics.

There’s one problem with the talking point: A card-carrying union member named Donald Trump was on the ballot more recently, in both 2016 and 2020.

Walz’s staff declined to comment for this article.

Trump, a billionaire, may not fit the popular stereotype of a union member, and he doesn’t belong to a union now. But, for decades, he did. 

Trump belonged to the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, commonly known as SAG-AFTRA, until he quit the union amid efforts to expel him after  a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump had been a Screen Actors Guild member since 1989, joining before the guild merged with AFTRA in 2012. During his membership, Trump appeared in such movies as "Home Alone 2" and "Zoolander" and such TV shows as "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," "Saturday Night Live" and "The Apprentice."

After the SAG-AFTRA board voted in favor of a motion finding probable cause that Trump had violated the union’s guidelines for membership because of the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Trump wrote a letter in which he said, "I no longer wish to be associated with your union. As such, this letter is to inform you of my immediate resignation from SAG-AFTRA. You have done nothing for me."

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The "done nothing for me" comment is doubtful: Despite his exit from the union, he received a union pension worth six figures as recently as 2022, according to financial disclosure forms cited by the Hollywood Reporter.

Reagan, a movie actor before his transition into politics, served seven terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild. 

As Reagan’s views became more conservative, he drifted away from his earlier pro-labor advocacy. When Reagan ran for president in 1980, Lane Kirkland, the president of the AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization for the labor movement, said Reagan’s backers were "among the most bitterly antilabor forces in America." As U.S. president, Reagan fired unionized air traffic controllers and replaced them with nonunion workers, a blow to the labor movement.

Walz said that, before himself, "the last union member on a national ticket (was) Ronald Reagan."

That’s incorrect. Trump was an active SAG-AFTRA member for both his 2016 and 2020 presidential runs, though not during his current candidacy.

We rate the statement False.