Donald Trump has threatened to pull the United States out of the World Trade Center so often that aides to the unpredictable president are starting to take him seriously.
Sources who had discussed the topic with Trump told Axios that he’s threatened to withdraw ‘100 times’ and that he doesn’t understand why the U.S. is part of the trade body.
Donald Trump has threatened to pull the United States out of the World Trade Center so often that aides to the unpredictable president are starting to take him seriously
‘We always get f**ked by them [the WTO]. I don’t know why we’re in it,’ Trump has reportedly said. ‘The WTO is designed by the rest of the world to screw the United States.’
The person who dished to Axios said that cutting ties ‘would totally [screw] us as a country.’
Trump signaled publicly, during his presidential campaign in July of 2016, that he was not a fan of the international organization that regulates trade between member nations.
He told NBC then that the ‘World Trade Organization is a disaster,’ in a possible precursor to presidential action.
Since taking office, President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of almost every other agreement he as a candidate bashed, including the Iran nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord.
He also demanded a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade agreement between the U.S. and Canada.
Complaints about the United States’ deficit with China has produced 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion of goods. The president’s anger about trade deficits around the world have led to worldwide tariffs on steel and aluminum.
The WTO is mediating trade disputes between the U.S. and China in the arena of intellectual property and metal tariffs.
A 2018 report provided to the president that Trump acknowledged with his signature acknowledged that ‘the United States has won 85.7 percent of the cases it has initiated before the WTO since 1995, compared with a global average of 84.4 percent.
‘In contrast, China’s success rate is just 66.7 percent,’ the report said, per Axios.
The WTO for its part says it has not heard any rumblings in the U.S. government about a withdraw from the body.
‘We have not heard anyone express this to us at any level of the US government’ WTO Spokesman Keith Rockwell told Bloomberg Business. ‘We won’t speculate on anything we don’t know anything about.’
Axios’ sources also dismissed a withdraw from the organization as something Trump is seriously considering – they have not marked up plans for the cataclysmic event.
At the same time, they warned that Trump could suddenly decide to act.