Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said Thursday that while he backs President Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel, he wishes the president would stop using the words “trade war” whenever he talks about them.
“I support or oppose presidents regardless of party based on their positions on trade,” the staunchly liberal lawmaker said in a speech to the National Press Club. “I support the steel tariffs with President Trump. I wish he hadn’t said, ‘This is a trade war. I want a trade war.’ It is not a trade war. It is a trade enforcement action.”
Brown argued that the tariffs were just “tools,” and applying them didn’t amount to a full-fledged policy on the part of the U.S. Nevertheless, the senator said the tariffs did constitute “our best chance to get China to come to the table and really negotiate.”
Trump tweeted last month, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” The tweet came shortly after the administration announced tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum.
The president has since used the phrase “trade war” in connection with his proposed tariffs and China’s plan to retaliate with tariffs of its own. But he has also argued that the U.S. has already lost the main trade war with China, so it now has nothing to lose.
“We don’t have a trade war. We’ve lost the trade war because for many years, whether it’s Clinton or the Bushes, Obama, all of our presidents before, for some reason it just got worse and worse. And now it’s $500 billion in deficits and a theft of $300 billion in intellectual property. So you can’t have this,” he said in a radio interview last week.
That’s awkward for trade critics like Brown who have long fended off accusations that their policies would lead to a trade war. It’s doubly awkward for liberal trade critics since backing Trump on anything is likely to upset some of their supporters. A poll last week by Luntz Global partners found that while only 27 percent of voters overall feared a trade war and just 12 percent of Republicans did, a majority of 59 percent of Democrats worried about one.
Brown nevertheless said that China had to be brought to heel, and the White House was right to try.
“They subsidize their energy, their water, their capital, their land in order to put people to work,” he said. “Those are violations of trade laws in many cases. … We have to stand up and draw a line: ‘You’re not gonna cheat when you make steel.'”
