After Exiting Anti-Sovereignty TPP “Rape” of U.S., Trump Waffles

After having withdrawn the United States from the sovereignty-shredding Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free-trade” regime that he once blasted as the “rape of our country,” President Donald Trump has now started to waffle. On April 12, he reportedly told a gathering of lawmakers and governors that he was open to re-joining, and that he had directed his top officials to open negotiations. Key establishment globalists and more than a few actual communists are celebrating Trump’s apparent change of heart. But among his base — the people who defied the establishment by the millions to elect him — concerns and even feelings of betrayal are growing. What comes next remains unclear.

Trump dropped the bombshell during a meeting of officials from America’s agricultural heartland, which relies heavily on both taxpayer subsidies and exports. According to news reports, the conversation began when Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), who has a failing grade on the Freedom Index measuring the constitutionality of lawmakers’ voting records, told Trump he thought the TPP was the best way to “put pressure” on China. To anyone who has followed the TPP discussions, that is ludicrous — in fact, then-Secretary of State John Kerry openly promoted Beijing’s membership in the scheme. Other neoconservative senators, including Ben Sasse from Nebraska, offered similarly naive — or dishonest — arguments in favor of TPP.

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In response to the conversation at the White House, Trump turned to two of his top economic officials, advisor Larry Kudlow and globalist U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer (a member of the Deep State Swamp known as the Council on Foreign Relations), and asked them to look into re-joining TPP. “This whole trade thing has exploded,” Kudlow told the anti-Trump New York Times. “There’s no deadline. We’ll pull a team together, but we haven’t even done — I mean, it just happened a couple hours ago.” Lighthizer, who has been working overtime to strengthen and expand the sovereignty-stealing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was also pleased.

By the end of the day, however, with an outcry brewing among his most ardent supporters, Trump had already started changing his tune on the “trade” scheme. “Would only join TPP if the deal were substantially better than the deal offered to President Obama,” the president wrote in an April 12 Twitter post at around 8:15 pm, the same day he made headlines for his “flip flop” on TPP. “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!” White House officials also sought to downplay expectations that U.S. involvement in TPP would be seriously revived, but they did not rule it out.

Even before his comments this week, Trump and some of his top officials had already been making noises about potentially rejoining the TPP. At the globalist World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump hinted that he would be interested in coming back if the United States could get a “much better deal.” And both Lighthizer, the top trade official, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a member of the secret Skull and Bones society, publicly said in recent months that they were already pursuing “high-level” negotiations to get America entangled in the controversial “trade” regime. Some of Trump’s new officials, including neoconservative National Security Advisor John Bolton, another member of the globalist CFR, have publicly supported TPP in the past.

Whether Trump was serious about re-joining or not has been a subject of heated debate since the comments were first reported. The apparent softening on pseudo-“free trade” regimes was especially baffling to his supporters, though, considering Trump’s comments on such schemes as recently as November in a high-profile speech in Asia. “I will make bilateral trade agreements with any Indo-Pacific nation that wants to be our partner,” Trump explained, adding that America must forever protect its national sovereignty and hard-won independence. “What we will no longer do is enter into large agreements that tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty, and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible.”

That has been Trump’s line from the start. On the campaign trail, opposition to TPP, a scheme Trump described as the “rape of our country,” was crucial to the bipartisan support he received — particularly from working-class Americans and union members in the rust belt. He took a similar line against NAFTA and other globalist projects. And in the presidential memorandum withdrawing the U.S. government from TPP, Trump wrote that it was the administration’s policy “to represent the American people and their financial well-being” and “to deal directly with individual countries on a one-on-one (or bilateral) basis in negotiating future trade deals.” The TPP includes over 10 foreign governments already, including Islamist and communist dictatorships.

Foreign governments and tyrants involved in the TPP, which creates what then-Senator Jeff Sessions described as a transnational European Union-style regime to rule over its member states’ economies, have been pressuring Trump to re-join. In fact, top officials with the mass-murdering communist dictatorship enslaving Vietnam have been loudly lobbying Trump to re-join — partly, no doubt, because their tinpot dictatorship would have an equal vote on the TPP Commission that would be able to set policy for Americans. Japanese officials and others also cheered, but suggested, publicly at least, that securing “better terms” for the U.S. government after the new agreement has already been inked would be tough.

Domestically, the opposition has come from across the political spectrum. Big Labor bosses such as Richard Trumka, the president of AFL-CIO, slammed the latest news. “TPP was killed because it failed America’s workers and it should remain dead,” Trumka said. “There is no conceivable way to revive it without totally betraying working people.” A number of top Democrats in Congress were also fuming. Far-left Senator Elizabeth Warren blasted Trump’s “ridiculous reversal,” calling it a “slap in the face to workers.” A number of other Democrats also expressed concerns.

On the Right and among the conservative grassroots, where most of the genuine, principled opposition to pseudo-“free trade” regimes has been, concerns were growing. Art Thompson, CEO of the constitutionalist John Birch Society, which has played a key role in defeating multiple globalist assaults on U.S. sovereignty, urged conservatives everywhere to get busy derailing any potential effort to get the United States ensnared in the scheme. But he emphasized that the real concern with the TPP and similar plots is the assault on national sovereignty and self-government — something the TPP takes to a whole new level with its mountains of international regulations and kangaroo tribunals that can overrule the American people’s elected representatives on crucial policy matters.

“We should not be talking about whether this is a good or bad trade deal. That is a trap,” said Thompson. “We are talking about sovereignty and independence as well as abrogating the Constitution by taking the regulation of commerce with foreign nations out of the hands of Congress. Since Congress is made up of the representatives of the states and American people, this means that the American people will lose control over their own economy. We can always recover from a lack of jobs and a poor economy, but can we recover from the loss of independence? This is a major step toward regionalization on the road to a one-world government controlled by the UN. This is what matters, and we should not be cornered into arguing on the basis of how the insiders want it discussed.”

On the other side, establishment globalists who viciously opposed Trump and his publicly articulated “America First” agenda at every step were giddy about the president’s latest waffling on such a key issue. “Excellent news that Trump administration may join TPP,” wrote Richard Haass, president of the sovereignty-hating Council on Foreign Relations. Joining TPP, the CFR bigwig continued, “would reassure allies in critical Asia/Pacific region, create jobs here to exporting firms, and provide a mechanism for pressing China on subsidies, tariffs, and protection of intellectual property.”

Again, as Haass knows well, Communist China has been repeatedly welcomed into the TPP in public statements by top U.S. officials, as has the Kremlin. And of course, the only reason the regime in Beijing is such a concern today is because Haass’ fellow CFR globalists helped make it into the powerhouse it is today. In fact, longtime CFR leader and patron David Rockefeller, who boasted in his memoirs about “conspiring” against America’s interests with a “secret cabal” of “internationalists” to build a “one-world” political and economic system, had nothing but praise for the murderous regime. “The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history,” Rockefeller wrote in the New York Times, ignoring the savage slaughter of an estimated 60 million to 80 million victims. That sentiment is widespread among the globalist establishment.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s latest comments on the TPP will actually become official policy. But with Trump being practically surrounded with globalists, the risk that America may surrender more national sovereignty to regional regimes such as NAFTA and TPP is growing. Americans who value independence and self-government under the U.S. Constitution must get to work immediately educating their representatives and their communities. A variety of tools to do that can be found here and here. Patriotic Americans have been successful in derailing globalist “trade” schemes on multiple occasions. But the Deep State Swamp never gives up, so Americans must remain constantly active and vigilant.

Image: Screenshot from a YouTube video by The Daily Conversation

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.