BYRON YORK: When Mitt Romney sounded like Donald Trump.
We know what Donald Trump says about trade and China. Google “Trump” and “China” and “trade war” and you’ll get an idea of how many people have criticized Trump’s threat to use tariffs to retaliate against Chinese currency manipulation.
But Trump is not the first Republican nominee to say such things. Many, many, many years ago — say, in the 2012 campaign — GOP candidate Mitt Romney repeatedly threatened to use tariffs to retaliate against Chinese currency manipulation.
“Mitt Romney has vowed to impose tariffs on China the day he becomes president,” the liberal Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson wrote in late September 2011. And indeed Romney had.
The introduction to Romney’s 59-point economic plan, released earlier in September 2011, contained five executive orders Romney pledged to enact on Day One of his presidency. One of them was:
An Order to Sanction China for Unfair Trade Practices: Directs the Department of the Treasury to list China as a currency manipulator in its biannual report and directs the Department of Commerce to assess countervailing duties on Chinese imports if China does not quickly move to float its currency.
Later in the document, in a section headlined “Confronting China,” Romney pledged to “impose targeted tariffs.” “If the United States identifies a Chinese firm or industry that is relying on unfair practices or misappropriated American technology for its competitive advantage, we should be in a position to impose punitive measures in response,” Romney wrote.
In November 2011, Romney elaborated on some of those positions in a CBS News debate. “[China] can’t hack into our computer systems and steal from our government,” Romney said. “They can’t steal from corporations. They can’t take patents and designs, intellectual property and duplicate them — duplicate them and counterfeit them and sell them around the world. And they also can’t manipulate their currency in such a way as to make their prices well below what they otherwise would be. We have to have China understand that, like everybody else on the world stage, they have to play by the rules.”
Well, to be fair to them, we elected someone who didn’t feel that way.