For all the times Donald Trump has maligned an opponent, he’s been complimentary of other people on at least a few occasions. Take Hillary Clinton and Vladimir Putin.
And . . . Bernie Sanders.
“I was watching [Sanders], and he talked about trade, and he was talking about how we are getting ripped off left and right on trade, and I said, you know, I think I can take that paragraph and just use it in my speech!” Trump said in August during an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
It’s unclear which paragraph Trump was highlighting. But he certainly had some choices. There’s this one, from a trademark harangue Sanders delivered on the Senate floor in April: “I don’t think I have to elaborate on the fact that when Americans go shopping, they walk into a department store — just look at the labels! Look at where the products are manufactured. Time after time after time, where the products come from is China, China, and China.”
Or this one, from the same speech: “After all of the talk on the floor of the Senate and the floor of the House, after all of the editorials written in the major newspapers throughout our country, after all of the discussion and expositions of Wall Street and the big-money interests, it turned out that [normalizing trade] with China was an unmitigated disaster for American workers.”
Ah, “disaster”. Now there’s a Trump word. It certainly fits The Donald’s description of U.S.-China trade relations, but he’s used it for even more than that. “I think the [North American Free Trade Agreement] has been a disaster,” he said in a June interview. “I think our current deals are a disaster.”
No doubt Sanders agrees. “[T]here comes a point when the American people are catching on that one of the reasons why the middle class of this country is disappearing … is because of these disastrous free-trade agreements.” Agreements with acronyms (NAFTA, CAFTA) and deals with nations (South Korea, China) — they’ve “destroyed millions of decent-paying jobs in America,” Sanders says, and arguing how they’ve ripped off the United States is Trump’s shtick.
“It’s one of my big things,” he told MSNBC.
So big that it occupies ayooooj spot on his otherwise spare website. DonaldJTrump.com lists only five of his policy “positions” — five won’t even get you through the letter C at HillaryClinton.com — one of which is U.S.-China trade reform. But whereas many candidates use such issues sections for a few paragraphs of talking points, Trump’s page on Chinese trade proposes a four-point, 1,400-word plan.
The broad strokes are to declare China a currency manipulator, end that country’s intellectual property violations, eliminate their illegal export subsidies, and strengthen the United States’ negotiating hand. These are the Roman numerals of the predictably titled white paper, “Reforming the U.S.-China Trade Relationship to Make America Great Again.”
Sanders doesn’t have such a campaign document. But on the United States’s China trade policy, he has recently matched Trump’s rhetoric.
“Can you be a great country where everything you buy is made in China?” he wondered aloud at a campaign stop in Iowa Tuesday.
They’ve shared stances, these two, sometimes down to the exact buzzword.
