Trump Touts China Agreement, USMCA in State of the Union Address
In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump touted a “groundbreaking new agreement with China” without alluding to the work yet to get done in phase two, and said replacing NAFTA was a promise he kept. “Unfair trade is perhaps the single biggest reason that I decided to run for President,” he said, according to a White House transcript. “Six days ago, I replaced NAFTA and signed the brand-new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement into law.” Trump “also promised our citizens that I would impose tariffs to confront China's massive theft of America’s jobs,” he said. “Our strategy has worked. Days ago, we signed the groundbreaking new agreement with China that will defend our workers, protect our intellectual property, bring billions and billions of dollars into our treasury, and open vast new markets for products made and grown right here in the USA.”
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., criticized this aspect of the speech in his own floor speech Feb. 5, “He claims he’s gotten tough on China -- he sold out to China a month ago, everyone knows that. Because he had hurt the farmers so badly, the bulk of what happened in the Chinese agreement was them to purchase some soybeans. We don’t even know if that will happen. But it didn’t get at the real ways China hurts us.”