US EDUCATION unions are poised for a showdown with President Trump after he accused school governors and local officials of wanting to keep schools shut for political reasons.

Mr Trump declared on Tuesday that the government was pushing for full school reopening in the autumn, saying that his critics “think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed. No way. We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools.”

But Lily Eskelen Garcia, president of teachers’ union the National Education Association, said that President Trump had “proven incapable of grasping that people are dying – that more than 130,000 Americans have died.