Labor chief Richard Trumka said Hillary Clinton will remain opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership if she makes it to the White House, even after the Democratic presidential hopeful once praised the agreement as the “gold standard” of trade deals.
“I’ve looked her squarely in the eye and we’ve talked about TPP. I’ve known her for 30 years and there’s never been one time when Hillary Clinton gave me her word that she didn’t follow through on,” the AFL-CIO president told reporters on Thursday.
Trumka said there is “no doubt in [his] mind” that Clinton would resist any pressure to flip once again on the trade agreement, which she first opposed during her primary battle against Bernie Sanders.
Trumka’s comments comes less than two months after Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime confidante of Clinton, suggested the former secretary of state could return to supporting TPP, with some changes, if she finds herself in the Oval Office.
“I worry that if we don’t do TPP, at some point China’s going to break the rules, but Hillary understands this,” McAuliffe told Politico at the Democratic National Convention in late July. “Once the election’s over, and we sit down on trade, people understand a couple things we want to fix on it but going forward we got to build a global economy.”
The AFL-CIO head said Thursday that McAuliffe should “keep his focus” on Virginia, and encouraged Clinton to continue running what he described as a “pretty solid campaign.”
