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Trump Blinks
Under increasing pressure from the fallout of the trade war with China, it looks like President Trump may be walking back one of his campaign promises:
WASHINGTON—One year after withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Donald Trump has asked his top economic advisers to study the possibility of re-entering the trade pact negotiations.
Trump has deputized Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, and Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, to study the possibility of re-entering the TPP if the terms were favorable, the president told a group of lawmakers on Thursday.
The president’s new openness toward the TPP, which he had said during his campaign was a deal “pushed by special interests who want to rape our country,” comes as he is facing criticism from farmers for his escalating trade battle with China. After Trump took aim at China with new steel and aluminum tariffs, Beijing responded by announcing it would place penalties on a list of agricultural products that would affect swaths of the president’s political base.
As a matter of policy, this is a big win in the column for “Good Trump” — it’s absolutely the right policy move from both an economic or foreign policy perspective. As a political matter, it remains to be seen how his base, vehemently opposed to most trade deals, will take the news that the President is going against them on one of his core campaign promises.
Published in Economics
I’d like to see a quote. Because you keep saying things like that, but that doesn’t make them true.
The US would already have been part of the TPP if Trump was never elected.
This a peculiar take Fred.
Unless you are assuming a Rubio win over Trump and then Clinton.
Clinton was vehemently against the TPP by election day. Was that deceitful posing? Perhaps. But Warren, Sanders, Baldwin, Casey et al. weren’t posing.
You think Hillary was heading in a neoliberal direction in January 2017 and breaking her party in half? That’s pretty unsupportable.
Of course it was. Clinton helped negotiate the TPP. Everybody understood that she was lying about opposing the TPP. Protectionism in the Democratic Party is mostly posturing.
It takes a special kind of economic idiocy to support protectionism. Even Obama generally supported free trade. Clinton did too. Warren’s opposition is mostly a charade.
Let’s negotiate a better deal on NAFTA too and sign it soon. I am self-interested and cheap. I want to pay less for everything. I will never work in manufacturing. What’s in protectionism for me? Of course, if we need to use tariffs to punish China, let’s do it and then make a deal.
How do you know Trump wasn’t cleverly lying?
There are at least two, not necessarily mutually exclusive 3-d chess explanations:
Why persist in the comment snipping Fred? I concede Clinton is a charlatan, even by the standards of politicians.
The opposition of Sanders, Brown, Warren, Casey et al. is not posturing. It is certainly not a posture that was going to change in 2017.
Would you like to join me in compiling a list of especially idiotic positions which define the Democratic Party.
Zero chance of TPP approval if Clinton had been elected.
It seems that you impute baser and dumber and more deceptive motives to anyone who disagrees with you than Trump does at times (of course we all do at times, see comment re Democratic Party above!).
And when he does not do this, should we have little doubt that you’ll be here with a “guess I was wrong”? I doubt it. Your early posts (i.e., snark) in this thread should be considered Exhibit A as to why some who are not predisposed to defend Trump do so.
What constitutes a better deal? What parts of NAFTA are deficient?
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not but you don’t really believe in the “genius Trump” theory do you?
The F and the T according to some people.
I don’t agree with that. I think Fred is right. Clinton’s ability to say one thing and do another is legendary.
Let Lighthizer figure that out. You can always get a better deal.
I think chess is a bad analogy. I played chess competitively as a kid. He’s not playing chess. He’s playing poker. I’ve played a lot of that too. Some of the best poker players would never meet the conventional definition of “genius”, but they have a strategy and they win. Let those laugh last who win.
I just don’t see evidence of strategy.
Keep looking.
You’ll be waiting a while. I’m of the opinion that what people call strategy is mostly projection. They see him stumbling towards something they desire and because he’s their guy they rationalize the stumbling as some deep seated strategy that only those with their pulse on the true Trump can see.
Its a pretty common human trait.
Lol. I’ll take Trump and no TPP over Hillary and TPP.
Right. Except that protectionism is the only political position that Donald Trump has been has been consistent on for the last 25 years.
Except that Trump has been a protectionist all of his life. Someone a long time ago convinced him that this was the way to go. Or maybe he convinced himself. He never was the savvy businessman a lot think he was. From what I know, he was always pretty unscrupulous. Didn’t care what he had to do to people to make money. That is not being savvy. It is being mean and uncaring. He also made a lot by being on television. And I don’t where this chess idea came from. You have to be pretty smart to play chess. One look at his tweets dispels that idea.
Well played, Mr. President.
I looked again. All I see is lurching from response to response with no sign of forethought. My dogs are better strategic thinkers.
Because he killed the deal on Day 1 of his administration and never made any sort of indication he had any interest in revisiting it until Larry Kudlow actually joined the administration.
If he follows through on this, you won’t be able to say that anymore.
You’re right. However, I doubt that will happen.
Moderator Note:
Incredibly rudeExactly.
Let’s face it, Joe. We keep trying to tell Trump supporters the facts of life. But being a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter (i.e., apologist) means not wishing to confront reality.I have no idea what’s in the TPP. It was a topic for pro Obama, then anti Trump spin. Figuring these things out and crafting something that actually moves our economy forward is extraordinarily difficult and almost certainly will end up in a giant log roll of narrow special interest deals. Protectionism in Asia seldom takes the form of tariffs that can be negotiated down. Each country uses administrative guidance or cultural attributes that we can’t do much about. Maybe the Trump administration can use the review to figure something out but the things we can control and actually affect are right here at home and he is already moving forward on some of them. What is important is to use across the board rules and simplifications so that our government isn’t picking and choosing which products to favor or sacrifice.
This is part of the problem, misrepresenting the position. No one I know of is against trade or trade deals in general but trade and trade deals skewed against America and American workers. It’s like Democrats who misrepresent the position on illegal immigration as being against immigration in general. If you can’t get the basic facts right it’s hard to give credence to any analysis.
He agrees with me now, so I’ll take it. Last weekend, when Trump presumably disagreed with me, I commented in agreement with Jamie’s point that TPP would help us strategically take on China (paraphrasing). I believed that then, and I believe it now. If Trump stops believing that tomorrow, and reverses course, I will say he’s wrong and still support the other 80% of his agenda that I agree with. That’s what the Gipper would do. That’s what any mature, intellectually honest adult would do. I don’t care what Trump thinks, I care what he does and how it turns out.