President Trump said Thursday he doubts trade negotiations with China will be successful, as the country and others have “become very spoiled.”
The president’s comments come as the trade delegation from China, led by the country’s top economic adviser Liu He, is meeting with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, as well as other Trump administration officials, in Washington the latter half of the week.
“With all the years and all the years that you’ve covered trade and nations and wars and everything else, you’ve never seen people come over from China to work on a trade deal. Now, will that be successful? I tend to doubt it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a meeting with NATO’s secretary general. “The reason I doubt it is because China’s become very spoiled. The European Union has become very spoiled. Other countries have become very spoiled because they always got 100 percent of whatever they wanted from the United States. But we can’t allow that to happen anymore.”
Trump has frequently railed against China for taking advantage of the U.S. and said trade has “been a total one-way street.” The president said that in the past, the U.S. never had officials who represented the country adequately during trade negotiations, but said that is changing under his administration.
“Now you have somebody that’s very good at this stuff — me — representing us,” Trump said. “And China has taken out hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the United States, and I explained to President Xi [Jinping] we can’t do that anymore.”
The president claimed the U.S. lost hundreds of billions of dollars on trade last year, but said that won’t happen anymore.
This week’s meetings between the Trump administration and the Chinese trade delegation follow high-level trade discussions led by Mnuchin that took place in Beijing this month.
The White House said Wednesday the continued discussions in Washington, taking place Thursday and Friday, will “focus on rebalancing the United States-China bilateral economic relationship.”
