More than a year after President Trump shocked Washington by fulfilling his promise to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, his struggle to determine whether he made the right decision has spilled into public view.
The president made a series of whiplash-inducing comments on the multilateral trade deal this month, causing frustration among aides and testing the patience of newly-appointed National Economic Council Chairman Larry Kudlow. During a meeting in early April with lawmakers from farm states, Trump told Kudlow to launch a review of TPP to explore whether American workers would benefit from the U.S. rejoining the free trade agreement.
“He multiple times reaffirmed the point that TPP might be easier to join now,” Sen. Ben Sasse told reporters upon emerging from the White House meeting. The Nebraska Republican described the moment when Trump turned to Kudlow and ordered him and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to take a second look at the 12-nation deal.
“‘Larry, go get it done,’” Sasse quotes the president as saying.
“There’s out of the blue, and there’s, I guess, out of the dark, navy blue,” Kudlow later told the New York Times when asked about the president’s TPP request.
Five days later, Trump returned to criticizing the multi-nation trade pact. It is unfair to the U.S. in its current form and would be unwise for his administration to rejoin, he claimed at the outset of his two-day summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
“While Japan and South Korea would like us to go back into TPP, I don’t like the deal for the United States. Too many contingencies and no way to get out if it doesn’t work,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that “bilateral deals are far more efficient, profitable and better for our workers.”
A Republican source close to the White House, who supports the president’s embrace of bilateralism, called his series of comments “unintelligible” and suggested he was acting in the moment when he first directed his economic adviser to review TPP.
“The president feeds off the energy in the room, and sometimes, that gets him into trouble. I don’t know that he was ever serious about TPP re-entry,” the source said, pointing to comments Trump made in recent White House meetings on gun legislation and immigration reform, from which he similarly departed days or weeks later.
Most administration officials viewed Trump’s refusal to endorse a series of bipartisan immigration deals, after telling lawmakers he would “sign anything,” not as a broken promise but as a campaign promise well-kept. None of the legislative proposals contained the four immigration reform principles he had promised Americans he would uphold, they had argued as frustration mounted on Capitol Hill.
However, his sudden TPP flirtation and equally sudden reversal is drastically different. Whereas Trump had not enacted new laws that could jeopardize the economy or displace certain immigrants if he suddenly changed his mind during congressional immigration reform negotiations, he has already withdrawn the U.S. from TPP and taken other steps to crack down on trade.
Injecting uncertainty and doubt into the administration’s pursuits on trade policy could have profound consequences for the U.S. and its European partners, as well as on the domestic economy. In a mid-April consumer confidence survey by the University of Michigan, 30 percent of respondents mentioned Trump’s trade policies as a primary area of concern. Overseas, a top securities company in Vietnam warned that U.S. re-entry into the multilateral trade pact “would have a significant impact on [Vietnam’s] economic growth, especially in sectors where the U.S. is a major export market.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a top contender for the next Democratic presidential nomination who shares Trump’s protectionist instincts, said re-entering TPP would mark “a betrayal of American workers.”
But even as Trump spent a substantial portion of his Mar-a-Lago summit with Abe discussing the trade deal and what would have to change for the U.S. to return, it remained unclear whether his administration could negotiate its way back into the agreement that 11 countries remain a part of.
“Anything that the Obama administration touched, [Trump administration officials] want re-done,” Deborah Elms, executive director of the Singapore-based Asian Trade Center, told Reuters after the president requested a review of TPP.
“I do not think that there is appetite among the eleven, at least at this point, for complicated renegotiations,” she said.
