U.S. President
Donald Trump took another shot at Canada’s trade practices Saturday, alleging that Canadian leaders have taken advantage of bumbling American politicians “for decades.”
“Canada’s brutal. Canada’s really tough,” Trump said during a rambling speech on behalf of a Republican candidate, Rick Saccone, who is running in Tuesday’s hotly contested special House of Representatives election in western Pennsylvania.
“We have a big deficit with Canada, too,” Trump continued, though his own Council of Economic Advisers acknowledged in its recent annual report that, as Canadian officials have repeatedly said, the U.S. actually has a trade surplus with Canada.
“They send in timber, they send in steel, they send in a lot of things. But our farmers in Wisconsin are not treated well when we want to send things to them,” Trump said.
That appeared to be a reference to an obscure trade dispute about ultrafiltered milk, a high-protein concentrate sometimes used to make cheese and yogurt.
“Hey, and I don’t blame them. Why should I blame them? Because they just outsmarted our politicians for decades. And I don’t mean Obama — I mean all of them. Since Bush the first. And that includes — I mean that includes a lot of territory. Frankly, Ronald Reagan … For many, many years they’ve been outsmarting us.”