Extended chat: Top US trade official defends Trump’s record

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0:34Today is Saturday, September 5th. I'm Sonia Hudson, and this is a special edition of the FT News Briefing. Canada's retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. go into effect next week. U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer told the FT that President Donald Trump will probably respond to those measures. Have you presented options to the president to do that? Yes, we've presented options to the president, yes. And you think he might pull the trigger? I think he might pull the trigger. Greer is Trump's top trade official. He's played a critical role in negotiations between the U.S. and its trading partners.

1:10The FT's Amy Williams sat down with him for a wide-ranging interview. They covered everything from the trade war with Canada, friction points with the U.K., to Trump's expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month. We're going to play an excerpt from that interview on today's show. So I'm going to start off with some general questions. U.S. tariffs on trading partners at some point last year hit their highest level since the 1930s. You've said a lot on how the vision is to create jobs here in the U.S., particularly manufacturing, but the data is quite mixed. There hasn't really been a big boom in manufacturing jobs.

1:47The number of jobs declined by about 60 ,000 between January when the president took office and July of this year. Although there has been an uptake of jobs in 2026, but your critics say that these jobs have mostly appeared in computer and electronic products, chips, other AI-related sectors, and they're not the sort of manufacturing jobs that you talk about wanting to boost. Do you think the tariffs are working, and can you tell us why? We do think the tariffs are working, and I'm glad you pointed to those data, and I think you need to look at them in the full context. So if you look back at what's happened over the past five or six years in manufacturing employment in the United States, obviously, we had a big drop off in employment across all sectors in COVID for reasons that are obvious.

2:32And then in the bounce back from COVID, you know, manufacturing jobs went up. But then when you got to about the middle of 2022, you start seeing during the Biden years just this steep decline. Last year in 2025, as the president really started his tariff program, the main goal was to stabilize, right, and to kind of stop the bleeding. And so this year we're positive. We're on a net positive in 2026 for manufacturing jobs in the United States. It's over 30 ,000. Factories aren't built overnight. Along with the now net positive we have this year in manufacturing jobs, we do see the factory construction.

3:08We see manufacturing productivity going up. So all of those indicators that we're looking at for manufacturing are positive and go in the right direction. What do you think drove the loss of manufacturing jobs under Biden? I mean, first of all, he presided over a huge inflation spike of 10%. And so you had input costs really go up, right? You had a business environment that wasn't particularly healthy. You had a focus on picking winners and losers. The Inflation Reduction Act said, listen, we're going to subsidize the types of manufacturing that maybe don't make market sense. things in wind and solar.

3:42So those are just a couple of aspects to it. Just to pick up on the picking wins and losers and the kind of industrial policy that Biden had, he did focus on green technologies, but the Trump administration has also talked about wanting to subsidize and help industries that you guys feel the US is too reliant on China for. So could you talk a little bit about why you think that's different from the Biden industrial policy? Sure. Happy to do that. So first of all, I think there is a common agreement across party lines in the business community that there are certain sectors that everyone agrees we need to have more resilience.

4:24Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals. I mean, we're not really in a position to do the Chinese thing of throwing$100 billion at an industry. What can we do? We can protect American industry. If we're getting subsidized cars flooding global markets from China and other places, well, we can correct that imbalance. We can correct that distortion with a protective tariff. So just to zoom out slightly, could you give us your quick summary of what your problem with China is? Like what is the purpose of putting tariffs on China? And I know that you probably have a really long and sophisticated answer, but what would be your brief pitch on that?

4:59Sure. I would say it's really twofold. There's a domestic piece of it, which is super important. We lost a lot of jobs to China and other places because we had low tariffs and people could, a multinational could go put their factory in China and ship it back to the U.S. duty-free. It was a big incentive. We're changing that so that people who make it in America have an incentive to build here in America, an incentive to give jobs to the working class here. You know, the second piece of this is a national security element where we live in a dangerous world. The world has always been dangerous for thousands of years.

5:30and the president's aware of that. Members of Congress are aware of that. Businesses are aware of that. And it's very high risk to be increasingly dependent on China for key things like critical minerals, which I mentioned, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, transportation equipment. That is dangerous, right? Regardless of whether China is friend or foe or whatever, it's not healthy or safe to be dependent on a single country for this, particularly one that has traits of an adversary. So I think that one of the reasons that trade is a really fun topic to cover is because it's also a political beat.

6:05Coming into the midterms, is there a risk that trade gets brought down somewhat by broader unhappiness of the economy? So if you go out and leave Washington, as you do frequently, talk to people in the real world, they talk about gas price, they talk about affordability, inflation, trade risks getting lumped in with that. Are you worried that the trade agenda goes down if voters round on the president over inflation? So I think that there are risks there because it is a complex area. But I mean, I just offer you a few nuggets that I think about. I think it's important for the public to understand.

6:44When people talk about some of the cost of living, they're largely, sometimes they're talking about housing. It has nothing to do with tariffs on imported goods. They're talking about education and the price of college. Again, nothing to do with imports. So when you really look at inflation, and then energy, energy is its own creature, right? We have not had any tariffs on energy products. We've just left that market alone. So again, all of the areas where people worry about prices or inflation, I don't dismiss those concerns at all, but they really have nothing to do with tariffs. I mean, when you look at food, our core CPI went down by 0.4 % in June.

7:20It was stable last month. Prices have gone down significantly for eggs. And most of the food we eat here is made here. Or it's imported duty-free from Canada and Mexico. So the tariffs have not affected – when people talk about inflation and the cost of living, it's not about the things where tariffs even have an impact. But do you think it's possible to communicate that effectively to voters? Well, I think it's challenging to do it, right? because at the end of the day, a voter says, well, my rent is high, you know, and then you have, you know, someone who's opposed to tariffs, a political figure who is less concerned about, you know, truth and economics and objectivity.

7:55And they say, well, this is a convenient excuse for me. All I know is when I go out into the country and I talk to the small business person, I talk to the farmer, I talk to these folks, most of them tell me, we understand what you're doing. We know we have to reshore. We're now doing a third shift or we're hiring again. My steel, I pay more than the other guy, but I'm happy to buy American steel because I want to have a secure supply chain here. These aren't the people who have lobbyists in America. They're not the people who have a hotline to the journal or to the FT to do a big op-ed. These are people who are running businesses, and I'm happy to hear that they're putting a third shift in line.

8:30I mean, this is why we're seeing manufacturing jobs go up so much this year, part of it. There's another tiny any question I have to ask you, so I just sort of flip back to that topic. But President Trump is set to meet Xi Jinping at the end of this month. Could you tell us what you would hope to see on the trade front out of that meeting? There's not some comprehensive trade deal out there with China and the United States that solves every issue. Far from it, in fact. The reality is our economies are so different, they just don't fit together very well. They're not terribly complimentary. All that being said, one of the things that we have set up with China is what we call the Board of Trade.

9:08And we are right now doing an exercise with our Chinese counterparts to identify a set of goods that we can trade between us, imports and exports, that are non-sensitive, where we can have balanced trade. And I'm hoping that for President Xi's visit, we can release some of the results for the public to understand. And then going forward in the U.S.-China relationship. If there are going to be trade measures in the future, which there probably will be, I think that's kind of the path we're on. These might be sectors where we can consider and say, well, if we're going to have trade measures, maybe we don't affect these things.

9:40Maybe this is an area where we can have stable trade. And then I think a second thing, and our agricultural community is very focused on having China as a market, but we may also see some additional movement on agriculture, maybe some non-tariff barriers that can resolve, of additional registrations of American agricultural facilities that can be certified to ship to China. Do you think the president is being tough enough on China? Yes. Yes. There's no American president has been as tough on China as President Trump. Now, some people may say, well, he doesn't say mean things about China, but that's not really the goal, right?

10:15Our view is not, you know, have some really hot rhetoric about China and then take no action. We would much rather have a good relationship with China. President Trump wants to get along with President Xi. It's an incredibly sensitive relationship, and it could be a dangerous relationship if you don't do it right. So it's important that we have very good channels with China, that they're open, that we have good constructive discussions. If we take measures, we tell them in advance. They tend to tell us in advance if they are taking measures. Those are the kinds of channels we have to have, and it doesn't help us to go out and moralize about China, and we take measures when we need to, and we have.

10:50But President Trump is quite mean about some other allies, trading partners, including recently Canada. Some people would say that you're treating your allies worse than you're treating China. Do you think that's fair? No, it's not fair because China has, America has the highest tariffs in the world on China, on average. We have our most extensive export controls on China. We have, you know, I can't speak for the security side of the house, but essentially our national security apparatus is really designed around China. We don't have that toward the other countries. The actions we've taken on trade, take steel or aluminum or autos, those are global actions, right?

11:29It's friend or foe. I mean, the reality is the only countries that have retaliated against the United States of America are the People's Republic of China, which you kind of expect, unfortunately, and And Canada, Canada, I mean, the EU, much larger economy, we were able to settle out with them, right? It doesn't mean that they're happy about it, but we were able to settle out with them. Japan, we were able to settle out with them. I mean, we're just changing our economic stance toward the rest of the world. It's not personal. If other countries want to take it personally, that's a little on them.

12:01And listen, as the president has said, he likes to do a little bit of trolling, and I'm not going to stop him. But at the end of the day, we offered them the best deal earlier a couple of weeks ago. And by no means are we treating them worse when it comes to the actual hard economics of the case. I know you've already said a lot on this topic, including in French. You know, there's been a lot of reporting out there. He said, she said, Canadians did this, Americans did this. And ultimately, what seems to be true is that these talks broke down fairly last minute. First of all, have those talks resumed yet at the time of recording?

12:35They have not resumed, no. Informally? Formally? We've had some outreach from the Canadians. Like text messages? Yeah, that kind of thing. Do you think they'll resume before Canadian tariffs come on September 8th? I mean, I would be surprised. I mean, I literally don't know what the Canadian plan is. And I'm the person who's had the most, on the American side, I'm the person who's had the most contact with them over the past month, right? We delivered a deal that we felt touched on their most important issues, cut their tariffs and steel aluminum in half, took down the headline rate on cars to 15 with a pathway to get to 7%, took off the supplemental softwood lumber.

13:16I mean, that's what we were willing to do. And the Canadians had some things they were going to do, which were good for us. It was a good deal. And do people want more? Yeah, people always want more. The things I wanted more, things they wanted more. Anyway, the Canadians made a decision, whether it was a political decision or an economic decision. I don't know. But at the end of the day, there was a very good deal on the table that touched on the things that were most important for them. You mentioned that the Canadians might have walked away for political reasons. Do you think Mark Carney sensed that President Trump does not want to get embroiled in a big, high-profile Newsy trade war right ahead of the midterms?

13:51He's got other stuff on his plate. He's got Iran. He's got the bond markets. It's just more going on. Do you think he sensed that and tried to walk away to gain leverage over the U.S.? Well, I can't speak to what's in the heart of Prime Minister Carney and we'll comment on it. What I will say is President Trump actually loves this kind of thing. So anyone who thought, well, I'm going to kind of flame out this whole deal and stick it to President Trump. I mean, it's kind of what he enjoys doing. I think an important thing to remember too is the Canadians came to us. Like we didn't go to the Canadians and said, please come do a deal with us.

14:28Like that was not the situation. They came to us in July. They said, we want to do a deal. I said, are you serious about it? Because over the past year, you haven't really been serious about it. And they said, yes, we are. We sat down and they were serious. They made important concessions to us. I made commitments to, you know, the United States made commitments to change things in a material, important way for them. It was a real negotiation with real outcomes and a lot of real benefit. for both sides. Do you expect the president to respond to their retaliatory tariffs on September the 8th? Probably.

14:59I mean, is there a plan in place to do that? Have you presented options to the president to do that? Yes, we've presented options to the president, yes. And you think he might pull the trigger? I think he might pull the trigger. I mean, again, this is, this is, this is a, it's funny because it was the Canadians that came out and said, this is a war, this is an economic attack. I mean, again, for us, we're just putting additional fees on foreign goods made by foreign workers in a foreign country. That's all a tariff is. It's just business for us. And Canada is the only country that's really decided that they want to, I mean, Prime Minister Carney used the term war.

15:30It's not a word we use, right? We don't talk about it that way. For us, it's business, it's economics. And by the way, the tariffs we've put in place whenever it was, 10 days ago, seven days ago, it only covers 5 % of imports from Canada. It's like a rounding error. And so to kind of have it whipped up into this giant thing where we're talking about war and economic tax and all these things, it's a little unhinged. But that's why I suspect Carney might be able to sit on his hands because it's not covering a huge amount of trade. This thing could drag on. Yeah, listen, I don't understand the Canadian strategy.

16:04It's, you know, they came, they wanted a deal. I said, I think this is where we can land. We landed it for them, essentially calling their bluff in a way and saying, oh, this is what you want, here you go. They talk about Fortress North America, kind of aligning our trade policies. we bear hugged that. We said, okay, great idea. Let's do it. We essentially say we're going to do almost everything we can. Some things we can't do. We're not going to do the heavy trucks and the dump trucks and some other things we can't do, but we're going to do mostly the things that you need to give you an even better advantage over the entire world into the most important market in the world.

16:37And they said no to that. So they have their own decisions. They have their own policy. It's not aligned with ours right now. I'm going to ask you about our other favorite country, the UK. You've already struck a trade deal, but you both sides agree to keep talking, developing that deal. How are those talks going? And are you getting the sense that London is picking Brussels over Washington? Economically, yes, they are. Within a few days of signing our deal last year, they signed a dynamic alignment agreement with the EU, essentially saying, you know, whatever you guys decide on some of your regulations and standards, etc., we're going to follow.

17:16That's how we interpret it, at least. And we interpret it on that based on my conversations with the UK, where I say, hey, you're free of the EU. Why don't you liberalize a little bit, accept goods made to American standards, accept agricultural goods made to American standards. And when they say, well, we have to wait and see what the EU says about it, you know, that is a problem for us. And that's challenging. So they're not using their Brexit freedom? No, no, they're not. Why is the second wave of the deal not happening? Well, I think it goes back a little bit to what I was talking about with Canada.

17:48Not to analogize, but just the notion of when you have a deal, each side ends up happy with what you have, but there are a couple of things that you wanted and you didn't get. But we're really with that second wave with the UK, we're really at a position where we have a really good core set of areas and things where we think we have in additional areas for cooperation and liberalization. But there are just a few things out there that are important to the UK and important to us. I think we're very happy with where the UK deal and that early harvest has landed. It's been really beneficial for both of us.

18:24So there is more to do. You know, I've had conversations recently with my counterpart, Johnny Reynolds, who's kind of reprising his role that he had early on. So that's a good relationship. We'll see where it leads us. And I think there is a lot of room for more progress on that front. What are you pushing for that the UK is resistant to? Because it used to be chicken. There was a whole media cycle around chlorinated chicken, you know, years ago when the UK was pushing for a trade deal there. Are we still talking about that or has it moved on? I'll be honest. In credit to the UK, it's the UK that is like they want more, right?

19:00They want more. So, I mean, our view as well. We just, you know, we have our trade policy and we're going to pursue it. If we can accommodate you in some areas, we will. But first and foremost, we're America first. And in our view, we have lost so much of our industry over the years. Our agricultural production was in trade deficit. We have a trade deficit in agricultural goods with the UK, which a lot of people don't realize. So that's something that is a sticking point. What is the UK asking for from you? Well, I'll just say our talks are confidential. So I'm giving you some color. But I would just say that sometimes we hear about iconic goods, right?

19:39They'll say, well, about this iconic UK good. And I said, I didn't know that was iconic. I've never heard of that being iconic. Scotch whiskey. Well, that is iconic, right? That was U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer talking to the FT's Amy Williams. This has been a special edition of the FT News Briefing. I'm Sonia Hudson. Check back on Monday for the latest business news.

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