Sen. Manchin Mostly Agrees With Trump Administration on Trade Issues

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. largely agrees with President Donald Trump that the U.S. has been on the losing end of most trade agreements, Manchin said while speaking at an event on trade May 23 at the Heritage Foundation. Manchin said he's happy with the trade relationships the U.S. has with Canada and Europe, but, "other than that, we're very skeptical." He said he likes where adviser Peter Navarro is going and how U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, approaches trade, but he doesn't like other views in the administration. "I think [Trump] has had a lot of infighting, which is to be expected, but it's the undecidedness right now that is causing a lot of inaction."

Manchin also lauded Trump's and Lighthizer's preference for bilateral deals rather than multilateral deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He said that America should abandon NAFTA and instead have separate deals with Mexico and Canada. Manchin mostly supports the Section 232 tariffs, though he said it's absurd that Canada should be included, since we have a surplus with that country in steel. Just using enforcement against China is not working, he said. "We know [Chinese metal] is coming through different countries. We have to shut that down," he said.

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., spoke before Manchin, and was asked about U.S.-China talks. "If the headlines are right about this China deal, I'm ready to pop champagne corks as well, but I've actually not seen any substantive details about this alleged deal," he said "It looks to me like we're losing the trade negotiation with China." Sasse said farmers visiting his office in Washington are not excited about how the negotiations are going, though they're glad the administration seems to be walking back from the brink of a trade war.

Sasse said Nebraska has gone from 70%-30% pro-trade to 60%-40% anti-trade since Trump's election. He thinks the administration's description of NAFTA as a disastrous deal "is just nuts." NAFTA renegotiation "starts with the premise that the U.S. got screwed with NAFTA." He said that's not to say NAFTA doesn't need modernization. "There's a big chunk of the original NAFTA deal that's about the cassette player in your car. That's not needed. You know what's not at all in NAFTA? Anything about backup cameras." And he said there are some areas where the U.S. can try to get its partners to move away from anticompetitive behavior through NAFTA. "The Canadian defense of their dairy industry is really inequitable, but the opening premise that NAFTA has been bad isn't true."