Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, seemed taken aback when ABCThis Weekhost Martha Raddatz juxtaposed the harsh views of U.S. trade deals of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump with Brown’s own critiques over the years.
Brown has said that he’d like to renegotiate a better North American Free Trade Agreement, as has Trump. Both men have also expressed concerns that China could enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal “through the back door” (a Trump statement we rated Pants on Fire).
“Well done,” Brown said after Raddatz played clips of his statements. “Good research.”
“A couple of things -- first of all,” Brown went on, “all I’ve heard with Donald Trump, the guy who made a lot of money from outsourcing jobs to China, to Mexico, to Turkey, to Slovenia, to other countries I’m forgetting right now -- the guy that made a lot of money from that is now against this trade policy, but never, ever raised his voice against it when Congress was considering it.”
Brown, in office since 2007, has been determinedly critical of U.S. trade policies like NAFTA throughout his career, even authoring the book Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed.
Meanwhile, it’s well documented that Trump often says a thing, thendenies having said it. So we turned to the public record of Trump on trade.
‘Never, ever raised his voice’?
Debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement had reached its zenith in October 1993. The policy passed the Senate the following month, was signed by President Bill Clinton in December, and went into effect Jan. 1, 1994.
Trump wasn’t a politician in the early 1990s. At the time, the New York real estate mogul’s name was synonymous with wealth, just a few years after he published 1987’s The Art of the Deal. In that autobiography, Trump cataloged all the ways that he’d expanded his influence beyond the $40 million he inherited from his dad.
Trump already had the type of fame that draws cameras for walking out to get the mail, so if the businessman were to weigh in on NAFTA, he’d be quoted.
And so he was. Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski unearthed reports of an October 1993 business conference in Bakersfield, Calif., at which Trump was a speaker. (Other speakers included Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, comedian Phyllis Diller, weatherman Willard Scott, and businessmen T. Boone Pickens and Lee Iacocca.)
Nobody taped Trump’s speech, according to conference representatives contacted by Buzzfeed. But Kaczynski found, and PolitiFact Ohio reviewed, local newspaper reports like one from the Daily News of Los Angeles, which called Trump “one of the few to come out against NAFTA.”
The Lodi News-Sentinel reported, “Trump apparently ardently spoke against the plan,” because, “it would only benefit Mexico.”
Trump said, “The Mexicans want it, and that doesn’t sound good to me,” according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
That same month, Trump did make his way to Capitol Hill, but not to talk trade deals. He testified before the House Natural Resources Committee, advocating tighter regulation over Native American-owned casinos on tribal lands. Such casinos were stiff competition for his own casino properties in Atlantic City, N.J.
Trump complained that prospective casino owners on reservations “don’t look like Indians to me, and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.” (The paper reported that Trump had been “on a tear on this subject for months.”)
Brown spokeswoman Jennifer Donohue told PolitiFact that Brown was trying to draw a contrast between his efforts to discourage outsourcing, and Trump’s capitalization of it.
“The point he was making on Sunday is that he’s never known Donald Trump to be an active ally in that fight,” he said.
Our ruling
Brown said Trump made a lot of money from outsourcing jobs thanks to NAFTA “but never, ever raised his voice against it when Congress was considering it.”
Yes, Trump has benefitted financially from trade deals like NAFTA. Even he acknowledges that.
But Brown’s televised comment makes it sound as though Trump changed his mind on trade when it became politically expedient. Rather, Trump was not a fan of NAFTA from the start, and was a rare voice in opposition to it at a Bakersfield, Calif., convention.
At the same time, when NAFTA was on the table, Trump sought the ear of lawmakers to lobby for his Atlantic City casinos, not the trade deal and American workers.
We rate Brown’s claim Mostly False.
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