Senator Schmitt Delivers Remarks on Senate Floor Highlighting Devastating Impacts of Unfair Trade Practices

Schmitt Praises Trump’s Effort to Level the Playing Field for American Businesses

WASHINGTON – Today, on the U.S. Senate floor Senator Schmitt highlighted the devastating impact of the decades-long America last agenda that moved Missouri jobs overseas and shutdown American manufacturing. Schmitt’s speech came ahead of the vote in the Senate to condemn President Trump’s recent fair-trade actions.

Watch Schmitt’s full remarks HERE.

Excerpts of Senator Schmitt’s remarks as prepared for delivery:

“Turn on the TV, read the papers, or open your phone, and you’ll be overwhelmed by the back-and-forths over tariffs, trade deficits, prices, and markets.

“We hear the talking heads say that America simply ‘can’t afford’ President Trump’s insistence on more favorable trade policies. We hear much less about whether America can afford to continue down the road we’ve traveled these past thirty years.

“That’s not a question that people in this city are asking. For many, it’s not a question that appears to have ever occurred to them at all.”

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“I’m speaking as an American – but in particular, as a proud Missourian. A boy from Bridgeton.

“My folks weren’t wealthy. My grandfather was an infantryman in World War II and returned from the war with an eighth-grade education and some money he won playing craps on the Queen Elizabeth on the way home…

“What was remarkable about our story is just how unremarkable it really was. That was the everyday magic of America – a country where lives like ours were not just possible, but common. It was who we were.”

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“But over the past few decades, the people in power squandered that inheritance…

“They shipped the good-paying, middle-class American jobs that were once the backbone of our economy off to places like Mexico and China, transforming once-prosperous towns and cities into hollow shells of their former selves, often defined by addiction and death.

“All the while, in the forgotten corners of this land, the men and women who built this country have suffered in silence.

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“Our country now depends on foreign imports for those most vital necessities. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, more Americans now work in government than manufacturing.

“Nearly half of our cars, more than 60 percent of our machine tools, 80 percent of our pharmaceuticals, and nearly 90 percent of the semiconductor chips we need for everything from phones to fighter jets are foreign-made.

“That is why the crisis that confronts us today is not merely economic. It is about the People’s Republic of China versus the West. It is about the survival of our civilization.”

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“Let me tell you what 30 years of so-called ‘free and fair trade’ has meant for folks where I’m from.

“In the 1990s, our political class embraced a new line of thinking – that America could become more prosperous by opening all trade barriers, regardless of how other countries treat us.

“The results were swift and devastating: By 2004, according to some estimates, Missouri had lost well over 31,000 jobs to foreign trade.

“By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico alone had cost us 12,600 Missouri jobs. By 2013, we had shipped 44,200 Missouri jobs off to China.

“By 2018, Missouri had lost more than 90,000 jobs in manufacturing alone — over 25 percent of our industrial base.”

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“This is not to say that Missourians don’t want a fair exchange — one where they can trade and grow with the rest of the world. But the ‘free trade’ that transpired was not that.

“The double-edged tragedy of this system is that not all of these companies wanted to leave. Some — perhaps many — wanted desperately to stay.

“These people were their neighbors. Their friends. Their family.

“But over the past three decades, we punished the companies that were loyal to America while rewarding the ones that weren’t.”

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“The post-war order has given birth to a shallow morality of materialism that measures value strictly in terms of consumption.

“This is a poisonous new idea — utterly alien to the traditional American way of life.

“Our trade policy, like our foreign policy, failed to adapt to the new reality of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consequences were nothing short of devastating.

“At the dawn of the 1990s, as America looked forward to the new millennium, the architects of globalization beamed about the promise of the “open society” — a world without barriers or borders, where all nations and cultures and economies would melt into one global economic zone.

“Thirty years on, what do we have to show for it?”

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“The twin horsemen of globalism — unprotected trade and unprotected borders — have been a catastrophe for our civilization.

“But I don’t blame the illegal immigrant who wants to come here in search of work.

“I don’t blame the factory laborer in Vietnam who takes the job that once belonged to an American.

“I blame the people in power who allowed them to do it.

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“I do not know what the future holds. But I do know what the past has meant. I know that something has to change — and that President Trump is the first politician in a generation to even care enough to try.

“The 77 million ‘deplorables’ who cast their lot with Donald Trump last November were the forgotten Americans, the blue-collar patriots, the conservatives of the heart — miners, mechanics, tradesmen and farmers, men and women who worked with their hands, who grew our food, built our homes, and drilled our fuel, whose labor powered our country, whose taxes sustained our government, and whose children served and sacrificed in our wars.

“They stand with the president, because he stood with them — when no one else would.”

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