Trump Touches on Trade in State of the Union Address; GOP Senators Stress Importance of NAFTA

President Donald Trump made a brief reference to international trade during his first State of the Union address on Jan. 30, without mentioning specific agreements or policies. The U.S. "finally turned the page on decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies, our jobs, and our wealth," he said. "Our nation has lost its wealth, but we’re getting it back so fast. The era of economic surrender is totally over. From now on, we expect trading relationships to be fair and, very importantly, reciprocal."

Despite some expectation of more substantial discussions of trade given the central role so far in the Trump administration, the speech only included a couple of lines on the subject. Trump's administration will "work to fix bad trade deals and negotiate new ones," he said. "And they’ll be good ones, but they’ll be fair. And we will protect American workers and American intellectual property through strong enforcement of our trade rules."

The White House also released a fact sheet listing trade actions undertaken so far under Trump. Among other things, the White House said there were "82 major antidumping and countervailing duty investigations" in 2017, "a 58 percent increase over 2016." The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department are working together to preserve the right to continue to treat "China as a non-market economy in antidumping investigations until it makes the reforms it agreed to when it joined the" World Trade Organization, the White House said. Also highlighted were the recently announced safeguard tariffs on solar cells and residential washing machines (see 1801230052).

Ahead of the speech, a group of Republican senators wrote to Trump to express support for NAFTA as the administration works to renegotiate the deal. "Whether manufacturers, farmers, or insurance providers, a wide range of industries in the U.S. have benefitted from this agreement and American consumers are reaping those benefits, too," the 36 senators said in the letter. Improving NAFTA "to increase market access, expand energy exports to maximize domestic energy production and including provisions on intellectual property and e-commerce will make this agreement even more beneficial" to the U.S.," the lawmakers said. Though not mentioned in the letter, there is some concern that Trump would withdraw the U.S. from NAFTA (see 1801100033).