Lighthizer: Trump Agenda 'Changed the Way People Think About China'

United States Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer says President Donald Trump’s commitment to economic nationalism “changed the way people think about China” as free trade globalists admit their failures.In a rare interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lighthizer notes that his tenure has marked a directional shift not only in Washington, DC, but also vastly among the American public with the majority turning on the hyper globalization that has gutted communities across the U.S. for decades.That shift has broken with the free trade consensus of ignoring trade deficits, along with its job-killing impact, and moved toward a policy of protecting American industry, jobs, and wages.“We want a China policy that thinks about the geopolitical competition between the United States and an adversary—an economic adversary,” Lighthizer told the Journal, adding:“We transformed the way people think about trade, and we transformed the way the models are,” Mr. Lighthizer said in an interview.