Donald Trump on Trade Policy

Relative to whether Canada should become an associate member of the European Union, Trump is against it and attaches a penalty to it, which is a substantive criticism of the proposal rather than of how it has been described. The conditional wording does not make this mixed: the condition attaches to his own reading of European intent and to what he would do about it, not to whether he supports the arrangement, and he separately calls the idea laughable. The closest competing label is minimizes, which loses because he treats the proposal as consequential enough to threaten trade over.

The reference point is Trump's waiver of the Graham Act Russia measures. Trump defends his own waiver as good for the country and the world.

Relative to the Section 301 forced-labor tariffs, Trump defends the tariffs as beneficial and treats the route now being used as a workable substitute for the one the Court rejected. He does not say the tariffs are a lawful use of Section 301 and does not mention forced labor. We used Defended or excused because he supports the tariffs and the route to them. The closest competing label is Mixed or conditional, because he calls the route harder and more cumbersome, but he attaches no condition to his support. The host asked about the tariffs Trump had put forward over the last couple of days, and Trump did not say which tariffs he meant. The Section 301 duties took effect four days earlier and CNBC reported the remark as about the new tariffs, but his answer also covers tariffs generally. The challengers cite the remark as evidence of pretext, and the government says officials' public statements do not change USTR's documented rationale. DI does not decide that dispute.