Perhaps nowhere in the Trump White House was the jockeying for ideological influence more raw than what staff members described as the “food fights” during trade meeting Tuesdays.
In the early months of the administration, these were the increasingly noisy battles between the China super hawks, like the senior trade adviser Peter Navarro, and free traders like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, the chief of the National Economic Council.
In one heated Oval Office argument, Mr. Cohn “lifted his leg on me,” Mr. Navarro recalled in an interview, making a gesture like a dog at a fire hydrant. Mr. Cohn declined to comment on the record.
Enter Robert E. Lighthizer, who arrived at the White House in May 2017 as the U.S. trade representative. Mr. Lighthizer, an international trade lawyer who had made millions of dollars suing China on behalf of clients like U.S. Steel, quickly lowered the decibel level at the Tuesday meetings, said Charlie Kupperman, a Trump deputy national security adviser.
He did so, Mr. Kupperman said, by using his knowledge of trade law to forge a middle ground between “Mnuchin, who was mashed potatoes on China, and Navarro, who was to the right of Attila the Hun.”
If Mr. Trump wins the presidency again, Mr. Lighthizer, 77, a longtime trade protectionist, has been talked about as a potential Treasury secretary, secretary of commerce or top economic adviser. Regardless of his formal role, it will likely be up to Mr. Lighthizer to keep Mr. Trump’s wilder impulses at bay while delivering on one of the former president’s signal campaign promises: to grow American manufacturing jobs by imposing draconian tariffs on economic adversaries like China, and on many friendly nations, too.
Mr. Lighthizer has already told Wall Street money managers that should Mr. Trump win next month, sweeping new tariffs could swiftly follow.
Mr. Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, joins many economists in saying Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to impose tariffs of 60 percent or more on Chinese products and 10 to 20 percent on imports from nearly everywhere else would drive up prices, shrink the economy and cost jobs. Tax experts call Mr. Trump’s idea to replace the federal income tax with tariff revenue wildly unrealistic, and potentially deeply destructive to the economy.
Unlike many other potential second-term advisers to Mr. Trump, Mr. Lighthizer has decades of experience in his area of expertise, international trade, and was described by a half-dozen people interviewed for this article as “the adult in the room.” But Mr. Lighthizer’s avid pursuit of protectionist trade policy has meant overlooking many of his boss’s excesses.
He wrote an Op-Ed article praising Mr. Trump’s trade views in 2011, while Mr. Trump was spreading the “birther” lie about then-President Barack Obama. He negotiated a rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement, intended to steer more auto manufacturing to the United States, while Congress was impeaching Mr. Trump the first time. He is an adviser to the Trump campaign this year despite some former colleagues saying he was horrified by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Lighthizer declined to be interviewed for this article. “I believe the focus should be on President Trump during this campaign and not me,” he said in a text message. Asked about his reaction to Jan. 6 in a text message to his cellphone, Mr. Lighthizer did not reply.
Missile Man
Mr. Lighthizer has spent more than a half-century in and out of Washington. But it is his roots in Ashtabula, an Ohio factory town on the shores of Lake Erie, that he has said shaped his opposition to trade pacts with Japan, China and Mexico as an “unmitigated disaster” for working people.
The son of a doctor, Mr. Lighthizer went on to Georgetown University and then its law school, followed by decades in and out of private practice and jobs in Republican administrations, including as deputy U.S. trade representative in President Ronald Reagan’s first term.
At the time, Japanese companies were gobbling up market share from American manufacturers of cars, steel and semiconductors. Mr. Lighthizer, who fought back in tense trade talks, at one point grew so frustrated with Japan’s negotiators that he folded one of their printed proposals into a paper airplane and sailed it across the bargaining table.
Tokyo dubbed him “Missile Man,” but ultimately agreed to voluntarily limit its exports of cars, steel and other products to the United States.
After the Reagan administration, Mr. Lighthizer joined the firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, where he helped U.S. Steel and other manufacturers sue foreign companies for unfair trade practices. In the early 2000s, as U.S. metal makers like Bethlehem Steel and National Steel went bankrupt, Mr. Lighthizer helped convince the government to impose hefty tariffs to shield the U.S. industry.
By early 2011, when Mr. Trump was toying with running for president and advancing a protectionist stance that drew scorn from many Republicans, Mr. Lighthizer wrote a Washington Times column defending Mr. Trump.
“For most of its 157-year history, the Republican Party has been the party of building domestic industry by using trade policy to promote U.S. exports and fend off unfairly traded imports,” Mr. Lighthizer wrote.
By 2016 he had joined Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team. When he landed in the White House months later, Mr. Trump at first did not entirely trust the patrician Mr. Lighthizer, whose ancestor fought alongside George Washington in 1776.
But the new trade representative sidled up to his boss by hitching rides on Air Force One to Palm Beach, where he has a house near Mar-a-Lago and, like Mr. Trump, an oil portrait of himself on display at home.
There were other early hurdles, notably Wilbur Ross, then the commerce secretary, who had been negotiating with China before Mr. Lighthizer joined the administration. In July Mr. Ross planned a party at his vast Washington house (listed at the time at $12 million) to toast a deal that Mr. Trump touted on Twitter as “REAL news!” It wasn’t, Mr. Lighthizer told the president. Beijing, he said, had sold the inexperienced Mr. Ross a package of old, weak concessions allowing certain U.S. beef imports into China.
Irate, Mr. Trump scrapped the deal, ousted Mr. Ross from the China account and put Mr. Lighthizer in charge. In Beijing a few months later, Mr. Lighthizer got tough with the Chinese while Mr. Ross sat outside the room.
“Having a trade lawyer’s expertise was an advantage, and he used his advantage,” said Clete Willems, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, and a close aide to Mr. Lighthizer. “Ideologically he’s a good fit for the president, and he just knows this stuff. He’s been doing it for 40 or 50 years.”
A Trade War
As Mr. Trump’s trade representative, Mr. Lighthizer blunted some of the president’s most destructive impulses, like withdrawing from the World Trade Organization and scrapping NAFTA entirely. But he was also the chief evangelist of Mr. Trump’s trade policy, with the skills to translate the president’s protectionist imperatives into law.
During a presidential trip to Asia in November 2017, Mr. Lighthizer trailed Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, as President Xi Jinping of China squired them through the Forbidden City in Beijing, followed by a lavish state dinner where guests viewed a video of the president’s granddaughter, Arabella Kushner, reciting Chinese poetry. But while Mr. Trump praised Mr. Xi in public, his trade boss harangued the Chinese behind the scenes.
“It was good-cop, bad-cop,” said Dan DiMicco, a former steel company chief executive and Trump trade adviser who has known Mr. Lighthizer since the 1990s. “You don’t work with the bad guys by just kicking them in the nuts every time you see them.”
Mr. Lighthizer repeatedly pushed the administration to deploy heavier legal artillery against China. So instead of addressing China’s violations of intellectual property through a cumbersome process with the World Trade Organization, the U.S. went it alone and began an investigation under a 1974 trade act that allowed Mr. Lighthizer’s office to respond more quickly to “unjustifiable” and “unreasonable” foreign practices.
The move ignited a trade war. The U.S. wound up imposing tariffs on more than $360 billion of products from China, frustrating many businesses that depended on imports. Still, the tariffs forced China to the negotiating table, which led to a 2020 trade deal in which China promised to expand intellectual property protections and buy specific numbers of American goods.
True to its history, though, Beijing failed to deliver. Trade data two years later showed China had effectively purchased none of the $200 billion in goods it had promised to buy.
Overall, Mr. Trump’s trade deals with China, and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that replaced NAFTA, have had mixed success by the Trump administration’s own metrics. After the deals entered into force in 2020, the overall U.S. trade deficit grew, and U.S. manufacturing employment has not risen significantly.
Academic studies have found that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on China failed to boost employment in the protected industries as American consumers cut off from Chinese factories turned to buying products from countries like Vietnam and Mexico instead.
Supersized Ambitions
This time, Mr. Trump’s bold and at times bizarre pronouncements in his third presidential campaign suggest he has supersized his ambitions on trade. Economists say his tariff proposals, now roughly ten times as large as those imposed in his first term, could dramatically increase costs for American households and even cause a recession.
Mr. Lighthizer simply argues that the economists are wrong. Last week he took The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to task for what he called its “jihad” against Mr. Trump’s tariff proposals.
In response to a Journal Op-Ed arguing that the great American economic growth of the second half of the 19th century occurred when tariffs were falling, Mr. Lighthizer countered that “America created the largest economy in the world from the end of the Civil War until 1900,’’ when average tariffs were high. “Also during this period,’’ he wrote, “the U.S. almost always ran giant trade surpluses and large fiscal surpluses. We became wealthier.’’
In short, Mr. Lighthizer concluded, “tariffs were a great success, exactly as Mr. Trump claims.’’
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