Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, admitted recently he is one of three “senior advisers” who have been working with the Republican presidential nominee on matters related to foreign trade.
The other members of the group are:
- Larry Kudlow—a conservative economist and former host of CNBC’s Kudlow & Company. He is on the advisory committee for the Kemp Institute at Pepperdine University.
- Arthur Laffer—a conservative economist and former member of the Reagan Administration’s Economic Policy Advisory Board.
“That’s a pretty good team,” Moore said. “I feel good about the economics people he’s surrounded himself with. My friend, Sam Clovis, is the policy director. When it comes to the people, I think this is actually one of the great assets of Donald Trump.
“You know, you don’t become incredibly successful in business … without surrounding yourself with really, really good people.”
Moore suggested Trump has been receptive to his economic policy advice. Donald Trump, he added, has “an important point” to make about Americans who do not believe the trade policies have not been in America’s interest.
“I think this is partly a snap back from Obama,” he said. “I mean, Obama, everything that he has negotiated, it was the Iran treaty, the Asia trade deal, the climate change deal, all of these things, and there are many more, they put America last rather than first. It’s like on the climate change stuff.
“Okay, we’re going to jump off a cliff and we’re going to shut down our energy, and then the rest of the world laughs at us, saying yeah, we’ll be right behind you. That’s got to stop. We do have to put America first in these deals. And if we do that, you know, and I think that TPP needs to be renegotiated, in my opinion, that that deal, why does it take thousands and thousands of pages to do a free trade deal?”
