Curtis Ellis: 'Everybody but Joe Biden' Recognizes 'Mistake' of U.S.-China Free Trade

Former Vice President and 2020 Democrat candidate for president Joe Biden still does not recognize the “huge mistake” and “disaster” of bringing China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), Curtis Ellis of America First Policies says.

In an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Sunday, Ellis said nearly all former supporters of China entering the WTO in the 1990s have admitted that the decision has led to the gutting of the American working and middle class, except for Biden who continues to downplay the threat of China.

Ellis said:

Joe Biden is not just sleepy Joe, he’s Rip Van Winkle Joe. This guy had an idea, 20 years ago, when he led the charge, along with Bill Clinton, to bring China into the World Trade Organization and to drop the annual human rights review, which China was under. [Emphasis added]

He voted against every amendment that would have held China accountable for forced abortions, for imprisoning labor leaders, for imprisoning people in Tibet … everything they’re doing today, they were doing then, and Joe Biden argued back then that bringing them into the WTO, opening up economic ties with China would lead them into democracy and peaceable kingdom … and all kinds of wonderful things and everybody gets a pony too. [Emphasis added]

And that’s proven to be wrong, everybody recognizes its wrong and was a huge mistake, a bigger disaster than the Iraq War even. Everybody but Joe Biden, that is. [Emphasis added]

As Ellis noted, Biden supported China entering the WTO and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), both of which led to the elimination of nearly five million American manufacturing jobs in the U.S. economy.

The U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5 million American jobs from the country’s economy, the latest data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has found. Millions of Americans in all 50 states have been displaced from their jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.

States that saw the largest amount of job loss from free trade with China include California, where more than 560,000 U.S. jobs have been lost; Texas, where 314,000 U.S. jobs were eliminated; and New York, which saw 183,500 U.S. jobs lost in the state.

States like Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Carolina, Vermont, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were among the ten “hardest-hit states, when looking at job loss as a share of total state employment,” the EPI researchers note.

Ellis praised Trump’s hiking of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. Those tariffs, which were originally set at ten percent, now stand at 25 percent. Trump said he is looking to impose a 25 percent tariff on an additional $325 billion worth of Chinese goods.

“This is a great move by President Trump, he’s called the bluff … you’re going to hear a lot of people saying they want to get tough with China, but … some creatures in the Washington swamp speak with forked tongue,” Ellis said.