Red-state GOP senators were super eager last week to tout the fact that Donald Trump had ordered his chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, to look into rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal Trump had scrapped last year. "Larry, go get it done," Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse enthusiastically reported to the White House press corps.
That now appears to have been a lot of wishful thinking—perhaps even pure fantasy— according to Kudlow. Bloomberg News writes:
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow downplayed the possibility the U.S. would enter into negotiations to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, calling it more of a “thought than a policy” for now.
The U.S. is “in the pre-preliminary stages of any discussions” on rejoining the Asia-Pacific trade deal, Kudlow told reporters Tuesday during a briefing ahead of a meeting between President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
In a Twitter post after the meeting with lawmakers, Trump said the U.S. “would only join TPP if the deal were substantially better than the deal offered to Pres. Obama. We already have BILATERAL deals with six of the eleven nations in TPP, and are working to make a deal with the biggest of those nations, Japan, who has hit us hard on trade for years!”
Trump is meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tonight at Mar-a-Lago and trade is certainly on the menu.
But for now, Kudlow just threw cold water on all those GOP lawmakers in farm country looking for a way to curb the ire of their constituents.