President Donald Trump on Friday lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her refusal to bring up the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the renegotiated trade deal to replace NAFTA, because she’s too beholden to big labor.
Trump accused the California Democrat of being controlled by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka to bring up USMCA for a vote, which the labor leader called “laughable.”
“Pelosi is totally incompetent,” the president complained of the California Democrat during an hour-long interview with Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.” “She’s lost, absolutely lost. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She hasn’t done anything. She can’t get anything approved.”
Trumka is a “good guy, a big union guy,” said the president, but he “has her mortified. She won’t do USMCA.
“Everybody in the country wants it, farmers, manufacturers, Richard Trumka plays her like a fiddle. I predict she won’t even do it. She has such pressure on her to do it. All she has to do is put it to a vote,” Trump goaded.
“Crazy Nancy Pelosi, who by the way is going to go down as the worst speaker in the history of the House of Representatives, she hasn’t done anything,” said Trump. “She is like, paralyzed. She cannot do anything.”
At another point, the president accused Pelosi of using the USMCA agreement as a whip to force Democratic representatives in districts Trump won in 2016 to support impeachment.
On Twitter, Trumpka said that the AFL-CIO would support replacing NAFTA if the USMCA contained more benefits for U.S. workers, but “it’s simply not there yet.”
The president, however, countered that any problems with the agreement his administration renegotiated could be quickly handled if he had Democrat leadership support in the House and Senate.
“I could end those loopholes in 15 minutes with crazy Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer [D-N.Y.],” Trump said. “They don’t want to meet about them because they like trouble.
“They don’t care about the country. The more trouble they have, the better it is for them, they think the worst it is for me. I got the wall built despite them fighting me,” he said.