Trump trade adviser Lighthizer warns of return to favoring 'multinationals, corporate profits'

Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said Saturday that trade policy under the Trump administration put working-class Americans ahead of “multinationals” and “corporate profits” and warned about the potential of the country returning to the former policy.

"Instead of being for multinationals and for corporate profits it became for working people and farmers and ranchers,” Lighthizer said about former President Trump’s foreign trade policy, at the annual CPAC. “That's what he did. He fundamentally believes that notion." 

He also said Americans, prior to the Trump administration, “thought outsourcing was good. They thought getting a cheap T-shirt was the objective of our economic policy. President Trump changed all that nobody believes that anymore.”

Lighthizer, who helped shape the administration’s get-tough tax-and-tariff policies on China, also said Trump was the only president in recent years to act on the Communist-run country’s unfair global tactics, which include efforts to hijack intellectual property and manipulate the international currency market.

"He altered people to the problem of China,” Lighthizer said. "Four years ago people thought China was a force for good. It was nonsense. President Trump never believed it. … He has convinced everyone that it is a very serious threat to the United States being No. 1 in the world."

Ligjhthizer also told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he thinks Trump’s trade policy has prevailed upon Americans but that they have to continue to make efforts to keep it alive.

"I think we won," he said. "But like every other really crucial idea, you’ve got to keep winning and winning it. So everybody out here is gonna stay on top of it. There's nothing conservative about free trade. What conservatives believe is maintaining our values, the things that we think are important."