Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump pledged Tuesday that if elected he would rewrite trade deals to bring jobs back to the U.S., and he blasted his Democrat counterpart Hillary Clinton for repeatedly choosing globalization at the expense of American workers.
“Hillary Clinton and her friends in global finance want to scare America into thinking small and they want to scare the American people out of voting for a better future,” Mr. Trump said in a speech.
The speech, titled “Declaring American Economic Independence,” was delivered in in Monessen, Pennsylvania, a city on Monongahela River in an area that has been hard hit by globalization and the decline of the steel industry.
Mr. Trump laid out a plan to overhaul U.S. trade deals, including going after China for manipulating its currently and using presidential authority to slap tariffs on China and other countries he said “cheat.”
“Hillary Clinton, and her campaign of fear, will try to spread the lie that these actions will start a trade war,” he said. “She has it completely backwards. Hillary Clinton unleashed a trade war against the American worker when she supported one terrible trade deal after another.”
He said that his plan to revise bad trade deals and push back against globalization would reverse the decades of economic decline ushered in by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that President Bill Clinton signed and Mrs. Clinton supported.
“The era of economic surrender will finally be over,” he said.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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