SOURCE:
POLITICOURL:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/newt-gingrich-trump-trade-vice-president-225035By SHANE GOLDMACHER and DOUG PALMER
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, under consideration as Donald Trump’s running mate, is dropping his decades-long support of free trade deals and picking up Trump’s strongly protectionist position.
“I basically agree with Trump’s speech on trade,” Gingrich said in an email to POLITICO on Friday.
Citing China’s taking of American intellectual property and the fact that the country is now in “a different era,” Gingrich said he had moved closer to the position of the presumptive Republican nominee.
That represents a significant shift for Gingrich, who championed trade agreements while a congressional leader, and a move that would smooth over one of the biggest policy differences between the two men who could form the Republican ticket.
Trump delivered a scathing rebuke of America’s trade policies in Pennsylvania this week, calling the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Gingrich helped approve while in Congress, “the worst trade deal" in U.S. history and vowing to renegotiate it. Trump also said he would pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact negotiated by the Obama administration.
“We allow foreign countries that cheat to export their goods to us tax-free. How stupid is this?” Trump said. “How could it happen? How stupid is this?”
Gingrich is among the candidates under consideration by Trump as a running mate and is currently undergoing a vetting process that includes requests to produce financial and political documents from him, according to a person familiar with the process.
Trump has publicly said he wants a running mate who has political experience, particularly in Washington, which Gingrich has in spades.
But that history includes Gingrich being among the highest-profile congressional supporters of NAFTA in the early 1990s, back when George H.W. Bush was negotiating the deal and Bill Clinton was pushing it through Congress. He even rounded up votes as the minority whip, calling himself part of the "Clinton-Gingrich Pro-American Growth Team.”
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