- Drew Berquist - https://www.drewberquist.com -

Biden admits Trump trade deal better than NAFTA

President Donald Trump has kept a myriad number of promises that he made to the American people when he was a candidate for president in 2016.

One of the most important was a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA. Flying in the face of conventional Republican free trade policies, Trump said NAFTA was a job killer that relocated businesses outside of the United States. He promised to scrap it for a new and better deal for American workers. That promise was a big reason he took majorities of working class voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and with them the election. Trump also campaigned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, to similar political profit. Once in office Trump killed NAFTA, replacing it with the better US- Mexico-Canada trade Agreement, or USMCA. TPP was not renegotiated.

Joe Biden, as a Democrat Senator, backed NAFTA and helped get it through Congress during the Bush and Clinton administrations. Interestingly, the genesis of opposition to NAFTA, the Ross Perot campaign for president in 1992, was a precursor to the 2016 populist uprising that catapulted Donald Trump to power. But now Biden admits NAFTA was a failure, he couldn’t renegotiate or kill it, and that Trump made a better deal for American workers.

Though over the years Biden has had several different stories on NAFTA.

Just the News reports, “President Obama and Biden, his vice president, each vowed during their eight years in the White House to renegotiate the deal. On Thursday, CNN news reader Jack Tapper said to Biden when debating the Trump deal: ‘He renegotiated NAFTA and you didn’t is the point.’ Biden replied: ‘It is better than NAFTA. But look at what the overall trade policy has been, even with NAFTA? We now have this gigantic deficit in trade with Mexico – not because NAFTA wasn’t made better, because overall trade policy and how he deals with it made everything worse.’ As a senator, Biden in 1993 helped pass the Clinton-era measure.”

Even after confessing he and Barack Obama were ineffectual in this effort and that Trump negotiated a better deal, Biden can’t honestly give Trump the credit. His lack of candor here borders on the delusional, as do so many other aspects of his campaign for president.