Campaign Trade Wars
Around that time, in a televised debate, Trump complained that the T.P.P. favored China. It fell to Senator Rand Paul, then still in the race, to point out that China was not a party to the agreement. Indeed, one of the T.P.P.’s main purposes, according to its American proponents, including President Obama, is to serve as a counterweight to China’s burgeoning economic power in the Pacific.
.. Trump—his trash talk, inconsistency, threats, and straight-up ignorance. In a meeting last week with the editorial board of the Times, he deplored the fact that the United States, after helping to create the Iranian nuclear agreement, was being beaten out by other countries in the scramble for new, post-sanctions business deals with Tehran. He clearly did not know that Congress, by declining to lift sanctions, is keeping the United States out of that game.
.. He even introduced legislation, in the House, to require his fellow-representatives to lower their own salaries, if they passed NAFTA, to the pay level of Mexican politicians.
.. On the day of the San Bernardino shootings, reflecting on the Paris attacks three weeks before, which left a hundred and thirty dead, he told CNN, “Whenever there’s a tragedy, everything goes up, my numbers go way up.”)