2020 presidential candidates on trade

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Presidential election
Donald Trump

Joe Biden

Howie Hawkins

Jo Jorgensen

This page includes statements from the 2020 presidential candidates on trade. These statements were compiled from each candidate's official campaign website, editorials, speeches, and interviews. Click the following links for policy statements about related issues: tariffs and NAFTA and USMCA.

The candidates featured on this page are the 2020 presidential nominees from the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, and Green parties.

Donald Trump
Joe Biden
Howie Hawkins
Jo Jorgensen

Trade

Republican candidates

Donald Trump

Donald Trump's campaign website says, "President Trump has kept his promise to crack down on trade cheaters and to promote fairer and equal trade for all Americans. In his first year in office, President Trump took action to protect America’s critical steel and aluminum industries, which were harmed by unfair trade practices and global excess capacity. One of President Trump’s first actions was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, advancing his agenda to protect American workers. The Trump Administration successfully litigated WTO disputes targeting unfair trade practices and protected our right to enact fair trade laws." ^{[source, as of 2020-06-22]}

Mark Sanford

Mark Sanford's campaign website says, "I also believe that the international trading system, created after World War Two, vital to America’s foreign policy. In this light, stability and predictability are important. Friends and foes alike need to have a sense of what America will do next. Alliances and investments are not made without predictability. We are not getting this from the White House and I believe the increasing talks of tariffs, and the seemingly daily changes of presidential perspective are undermining our standing in the world." ^{[source, as of 2019-09-10]}

Joe Walsh

In an op-ed about Donald Trump published in The New York Times, Walsh wrote, "He abuses the Constitution for his narcissistic trade war. In private, most congressional Republicans oppose the trade war, but they don’t say anything publicly. But think about this: Mr. Trump’s tariffs are a tax increase on middle-class Americans and are devastating to our farmers" ^{[source, as of 2019-08-14]}

Bill Weld

Bill Weld said in a speech, "On the international front, the United States should return to a regime of free trade rather than having constant recourse to tariffs. Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley tried tariffs in June, 1930, and fanned the flames of the Great Depression." ^{[source, as of 2019-02-15]}

Democratic candidates

Joe Biden

Joe Biden's campaign website says, "The goal of every decision about trade must be to build the American middle class, create jobs, raise wages, and strengthen communities. To stand up for American workers, Biden’s tax and trade strategy will take a number of steps, including: Take aggressive trade enforcement actions against China or any other country seeking to undercut American manufacturing through unfair practices. Rally our allies in a coordinated effort to pressure the Chinese government and other trade abusers to follow the rules and hold them to account when they do not. Confront foreign efforts to steal American intellectual property. Apply a carbon adjustment fee against countries that are failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations. Support strong and independent trade unions here in the United States and in every one of our trading partners." ^{[source, as of 2020-08-03]}

Michael Bloomberg

Mike Bloomberg said in a speech, "It’s worth remembering that trade, more than almost any other human innovation, has reduced suffering and raised living standards across the globe. Over the past few decades alone, it has helped lift more than a billion people out of poverty. And it’s also played a big role in making the world more peaceful and stable by connecting nations to one another and aligning our interests. Of course, trade is by no means perfect. The benefits of free trade have not been distributed as widely as they should be. So we must do more to fix that. Spreading the benefits of trade more widely is part of a bigger economic question: how do we promote growth that is inclusive, sustainable, and fair? And how do we address people’s real fears about the future? My friend Tom Friedman at The New York Times has a smart way of thinking about these issues. He once wrote: ‘The best ways to manage the ups and downs of trade is to strengthen your floors, not raise your walls or build ceilings.’ In other words the answer isn't to build walls along borders or around industries, through tariffs." ^{[source, as of 2019-01-15]}

Cory Booker

In an interview with CNBC, Cory Booker said, "I want to be known as a pro-fair trade Democrat — not trade in a way that’s going to put American workers in the cross hairs. I think the global trade agreements that we have been in, we did not have a plan for factory workers in the Midwest, for small businesses in New Jersey. We did not account for how globalism was going to severely hurt people in America."

Booker continued, "I’m telling you what was bad was that we did not have a comprehensive plan. Switzerland has a program that if you lose your job, say globalism kills a company, you go right into an apprenticeship that holds your salary and trains you for a modern job. That’s a message that’s very different from what we’ve been doing. What I’m saying to you is, workers need to be at the center. Environmental issues at a time of global climate change, need to be at the center of these negotiations, and they’re not." ^{[source, as of 2019-06-13]}

Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg said, "We need to find a way to make sure that trade actually works for us. There's no building a wall around the status quo. You can't put the horse back into the barn. It doesn't work that way. But what we do need to make sure of is that there are enough measures, including adjustment assistance, including making sure that we make whole in some way the people who were made worse off, that we're actually keeping the promise of trade." ^{[source, as of 2019-04-22]}

Julián Castro

Julián Castro's website did not include a position on trade. In an interview with New York Magazine's Intelligencer, Castro said the following when asked about his position on NAFTA: "We have this global economy that already is established, and we’re competing in. It’s not realistic to think that we’re going to withdraw from that wholly. I do think that we ought to only strike trade agreements that are good for American workers and American companies. I disagree with people who say we’re going to close off trade."

Castro also said, "I do think we need to hold countries accountable who violate trade agreements that are already in place. We need to get stronger about enforcement, that in the future if we strike a trade agreement, toughening up labor standards and environmental standards and enforcement standards is something we absolutely need to do. The thing is, look at what President Trump did on this renegotiation of NAFTA. He didn’t scrap NAFTA, what he did is make a few incremental changes to it. And so I hope that the American people get that even the president recognizes that there can be value in boosting American workers and American companies, and there can be a mutually beneficial relationship that we have with other countries in trade." ^{[source, as of 2019-02-02]}

Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard tweeted, "Trump’s trade wars are a disaster. Billions in bailouts to farmers. Unstable markets for small businesses. We need trade policies that put the people first." ^{[source, as of 2019-02-26]}

Kamala D. Harris

Kamala Harris opposes NAFTA and the Trump administration's tariffs policy.

She said in a CNN interview, "I would not have voted for NAFTA, and because I believe that we can do a better job to protect American workers." At the California Democratic Party annual convention, Harris said that the Trump administration's tariffs were a "trade tax." She continued, "I like to call it Trump’s trade tax. And his trade tax is taking $1.4 billion out of working people’s pockets every month." ^{[source, as of 2019-06-01]}

Amy Klobuchar

Amy Klobuchar's campaign published a plan for her first 100 days in office, which includes the following: "Restart the President’s Export Council. Senator Klobuchar will restart the President’s Export Council, which brings together business, labor, and agricultural leaders with Members of Congress and key Administration officials to help promote a comprehensive export and trade strategy."

The plan also includes the following: "Aggressively combat illegal Chinese steel dumping. Senator Klobuchar will ensure the federal government is aggressively combating illegal Chinese steel dumping including through expanded personnel to enforce our trade laws and increased inspections of steel imports at ports of entry. She will also direct the U.S. Department of Labor to expedite approval of Trade Adjustment Assistance petitions for workers from the affected mining operations." ^{[source, as of 2019-06-18]}

Beto O'Rourke

Beto O'Rourke wrote in a Medium post, "As President, Beto will: End Trump’s trade war. Defend American values and interests against competitors like China. Pursue trade agreements that support working families. Work to enhance the competitiveness of U.S. workers and small businesses."

O'Rourke's policies included the following: "Suspend Trump’s tariffs immediately. Modernize the World Trade Organization to address 21st century trade issues.Screening and potentially limiting Chinese investment in certain U.S. sectors until it ends its most egregious anti-competitive practices. Investing in the analysis needed to detect currency manipulation. Negotiate trade agreements with strong labor and environmental standards. Reverse Trump’s tax bill rewarding companies who shift jobs overseas." ^{[source, as of 2019-08-29]}

Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders' campaign website says "We need a new trade policy that creates decent-paying jobs in America and ends the race to the bottom. Corporate America cannot continue to throw American workers out on the street while they outsource our jobs and enjoy record-breaking profits. Despite the president’s tough rhetoric and haphazard tariffs, under Trump, we now have a record-breaking $890 billion annual trade deficit in goods. And since Trump was elected, multinational corporations have shipped 185,000 American jobs overseas. That is unacceptable."

His campaign website goes on: "As part of a new trade policy, we must: Eliminate the incentives baked into our current trade and tax agreements that make it easier for multinational corporations to ship jobs overseas. Corporations should not be able to get a tax deduction for the expenses involved in moving their factories abroad and throwing American workers out on the street. Instead of providing federal tax breaks, contracts, grants, and loans to corporations that outsource jobs, we need to support the small businesses that are creating good jobs in America. We must also expand “Buy American,” “Buy Local,” and other government policies that will increase jobs in the U.S. We need to make sure that strong and binding labor, environmental, and human rights standards are written into the core text of all trade agreements. We must also add to the core text of every U.S. trade agreement, enforceable rules against currency cheating, which allows countries to unfairly dump their products in this country and makes our exports more expensive abroad. Our trade policies must support communities of color that have been impacted the worst by our unfair trade deals. Undo the harm that trade agreements have done to family farmers. We must eliminate rules in our trade deals that increase the cost of medicines." ^{[source, as of 2019-08-23]}

Thomas Steyer

Tom Steyer's campaign website says of trade in the context of climate change, "Reduce the threat of global conflict and support other nations to achieve prosperity without fossil fuels by meeting and increasing our investment in international clean energy and sustainable development systems, eliminating our demand for fossil fuels, leading a worldwide transition to clean energy, and using the global purchasing power of the United States and international trade agreements to send a clear signal that the fossil fuel era is coming to an end and the clean energy age has begun." ^{[source, as of 2019-09-10]}

Elizabeth Warren

In a plan published online, Elizabeth Warren wrote, "As President, I won’t hand America’s leverage to big corporations to use for their own narrow purposes — I’ll use it to create and defend good American jobs, raise wages and farm income, combat climate change, lower drug prices, and raise living standards worldwide. We will engage in international trade — but on our terms and only when it benefits American families."

The plan goes on to call for the following: "A Trade Negotiation Process that Reflects America’s Interests," "Using Our Leverage to Demand More for American Families and to Raise the Global Standard of Living," and "Delivering for American Families with Stronger Enforcement." ^{[source, as of 2019-07-29]}

Andrew Yang

Andrew Yang's campaign website says, "We need to ensure that our trade deals with other countries match our values and environmental goals. We need to renegotiate our trade deals that protect the fossil fuel industry. Instead, our trade deals need to ensure that any goods manufactured using unsustainable methods are appropriately costed, and the fossil fuel industries don’t get unwarranted power in the deals. As President, I will: Ensure that any trade negotiation includes stringent environmental standards. Ensure that any trade deal doesn’t include carve-outs or exclusives for oil, gas, or coal. Renegotiate any trade deal that includes carve-outs for fossil fuel industries, including the ISDS exceptions in NAFTA/USMCA." ^{[source, as of 2019-08-29]}

Green candidates

Howie Hawkins

Howie Hawkins' campaign website says, "International borders should be authentic fair-trade zones where people are free to travel across borders for work, shopping, recreation, and residence." ^{[source, as of 2020-07-09]}

Libertarian candidates

Jo Jorgensen

Jo Jorgensen's campaign website says, "The freedom to trade and travel are fundamental to human liberty. As American citizens, we should be free to travel anywhere we choose, and to buy and sell anywhere in the world. As President, I will use my Constitutional authority to eliminate trade barriers & tariffs, and work to repeal arbitrary quotas on the number of people who can legally enter the United States to work, visit, or reside." ^{[source, as of 2020-07-28]}

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Footnotes