Trump: I Will Consolidate All Trade Negotiations Into One Office

During a speech Thursday in Delaware, Ohio, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made a major policy announcement related to foreign trade and jobs creation.

“At the center of my historic jobs plan will be fixing our terrible trade deals,” he said. “Forty-seven million Americans are in poverty and 45 million Americans are on Food Stamps. We have nearly an $800 billion annual trade deficit in goods with the world, and the worst so-called recovery since the Great Depression.”

Trump noted that Ohio, a key battleground state in the 2016 presidential election, has lost roughly one-quarter of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA and China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization. Both were considered major accomplishments of President Bill Clinton’s tenure—and for which Hillary Clinton has taken at least partial credit.

“We are living through the greatest jobs theft in the history of the world,” he said. “A Trump administration is going to renegotiate NAFTA, stand up to foreign cheating and stop the jobs from leaving our country. I also have another major announcement I am going to make today that concerns manufacturing in the United States, and how we are going to bring jobs back to Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and all across this great nation.”

Trump said American trade policy is currently being mismanaged by dozens of competing bureaucracies spread across the agriculture, commerce, labor, state and treasury departments, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative. His proposal is to consolidate those efforts into one office.

“It will report to an American Desk and it will be located inside the Department of Commerce,” he said. “The mission of the American Desk will be to protect the economic interests of the American worker, and the national interests of the United States.

“It’s going to be America first.”