This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 23rd, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Of all the trade errors of the former Trump administration, one stands out to Cato's

Scott Linsicum. He explains why we're going to be

living with the consequences of that one big mistake for a long time.

From a free trade perspective, there are so many errors both intentional and probably mistaken that the

Trump administration made with respect to trade. I can remember him threatening companies

that were daring to consider to move their

production to lower cost places like carrier. There were domestic content requirements

that the Trump administration pushed hard on when it comes to various products.

But what was, in your view, the worst mistake or worst error of the Trump administration whether they recognize it or not.

It is a tough call since there are so many to choose from but if I had to pick one it would be the day one rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement,

which was a free trade agreement that the Bush and Obama administrations had negotiated

with a bunch of other countries in the Asia Pacific region,

including Canada and Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, so forth.

So Trump in a bold day one maneuver abandoned the agreement even though it had been completed and was really just

ready for Congress to consider it.

So in doing that, Trump set off a chain of events

that we are still very much scrambling to recover from and quite frankly are pulling a bit of a

Humpty Dumpty routine trying to put the broken egg back together again and it's

not going very well. What we ought to understand about trade agreements, multilateral versus bilateral trade agreements,

is that bilateral trade agreements sort of lock you into stuff that your next bilateral trade agreement will try to get you to undo or certain

...