‘America First’
President Donald Trump, speaking in Davos, insists that cross-border trade has to be made fairer.
DAVOS, Switzerland — President Donald Trump reassured the world’s political and financial leaders Friday that his “America First” agenda was not a rejection of international cooperation, but he insisted that cross-border trade had to be made fairer and vowed to take action against predatory practices.
It was an encounter that once would have been considered unlikely: a president who ran on a nationalist platform and has sought to raise barriers since taking office, addressing an exclusive gathering of billionaire investors, corporate executives and heads of state who have spent decades building the global economic system that he has taken steps to dismantle.
Trump sought to reconcile the profound differences in their approaches with a relatively sober, restrained speech that argued that defending national interests was consistent with a global system. And he touted what he called a rising economy in the United States, declaring that “America is back” and inviting foreign businesses to invest.
“I believe in America,” Trump told a packed auditorium at the conclusion of the annual World Economic Forum. “As president of the United States, I will always put America first — just like the leaders of other countries should put their country first. But America First does not mean America alone.”
And yet, he did not back down from his demand that the system be overhauled to guard the United States from what he called unfair behavior.
“We cannot have free and open trade if some countries exploit the system at the expense of others,” he said. “We support free trade, but it needs to be fair, and it needs to be reciprocal, because in the end, unfair trade undermines us all. The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair trade practices.”
His message of a U.S. economic comeback, however, was tempered by a report that came out even as he was onstage. The U.S. economy grew by 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017, healthy but lower than the 3 percent that had been expected and that he had set as his goal. Overall, the economy grew 2.3 percent in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, up from 1.6 percent in 2016, President Barack Obama’s last year.
The speech was largely written by Gary Cohn, the president’s national economic adviser and a former Goldman Sachs banker, and Robert Porter, the White House staff secretary. Stephen Miller, the immigration hard-liner who often writes the president’s more provocative speeches, was busy working on next week’s State of the Union address, giving Cohn more of a free hand in shaping Trump’s message to his former peers from Wall Street and their international equivalents.
Trump, who often veers off on tangents, stuck largely to the script during the 15-minute speech.