Wilbur Ross, President Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary, will lead accelerated talks with Mexico and Canada on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, Trump said today.
[Daily News| February 2, 2017 |Inside US Trade]
Meeting with the leaders of the House Ways & Means and Senate Finance committee at the White House and flanked by Ross and other senior trade advisers, Trump decried NAFTA as a “catastrophe” and declared “I want to change it.”
Praising what he called an “all-star team of top-level people that are working on trade,” Trump said Ross is “going to be representing us in negotiations” along with “other great people.”
More from Trump:
We are working very hard, and will be very soon, as soon as we get the go ahead, we have the 90-day period that we have to think about but we want to get that whole thing kick-started and going. We have some statutory limits, and we don’t have to have those statutory limits so it’s very important. I have very serious concerns about NAFTA. NAFTA’s been a catastrophe for our country, it’s been a catastrophe for our workers and jobs and our companies that are leaving our country. I want to change it. And maybe we do it.
Maybe we do a new NAFTA, and we put an extra F in the term NAFTA. You know what the F is for, right? Free and fair trade. Not just free trade. Free and fair trade. Because it’s very unfair.
