President Donald Trump’s meeting with Republican senators on trade last week did nothing to unstick his stalled trade deal with Mexico and Canada.
Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Monday that the president once again refused to lift steel and aluminum tariffs on U.S. allies when pressed, a requirement that Grassley has laid out to consider the U.
S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement to replace NAFTA. Trump also refused to rule out imposing tariffs on foreign automakers, Grassley said.Trump also threatened in recent days to impose 25 percent tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods, a move that raised further fears of a retaliatory tit-for-tat with China.
The meeting left the president’s long-sought trade deal with a grim prognosis in the immediate future.
“Assume Chuck Grassley was for the tariffs. Doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. It isn’t going to come up in [this] environment,” Grassley said on Monday. “The president doesn’t have to worry about Chuck Grassley, he’s got to worry about what the general environment is here.”
Earlier this year, Trump spurned Grassley's direct lobbying to lift tariffs that have caused retaliatory levies against Midwestern farmers. Last week, Grassley said his request met “with the same results
Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and John Thune (R-S.D.) also attended the meeting and lobbied “against auto tariffs” that Trump has threatened to impose, Grassley said.
“The president knew the meeting was stacked with senators who thought that the tariff issue needed to be resolved or we wouldn’t be able” to pass the trade deal, Cornyn said on Monday.
“He made clear he liked tariffs as an instrument to bring people to the negotiating table. So it wasn’t necessarily a welcome message."Grassley said that the president didn’t rule out enacting those auto tariffs, either.
“Haven’t you heard?” Grassley said, quoting Trump: “‘I like tariffs.’”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this story.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine