In response to Trump announcing a “phase one” trade deal with China that is the same deal he falsely claimed that he reached more than two months ago, DNC Deputy War Room Director Daniel Wessel released the following statement:

“Trump got rolled by the Chinese. Trump agreed to major concessions to China without addressing the major structural issues he promised to fix or even undoing all the damage that’s been done since he promised to take on China. This is an embarrassing defeat for the president and a stunning betrayal of the American workers, farmers, and manufacturers he’s strung along for more than two years.”

Trump’s phase one trade deal makes major concessions to China without doing anything to fix the major structural issues.

CNN: “The ‘phase one’ deal does not address the major structural changes to China’s economy that Trump has sought.”

Bloomberg: “For Beijing, reducing even some of the tariffs that have been imposed since last year represents a win for President Xi Jinping, who is also facing pressure to not give in to the other side.”

Washington Post: “An official statement from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative did little to dispel the confusion, offering no specific figures on the agreed Chinese purchases of U.S. farm goods and other products or what structural changes China would make in its economic system.”

Trump’s trade deal won’t undo the years of damage his erratic trade policy has done to farmers and manufacturers.

Washington Post: “No formal estimates of the China deal’s impact have been released, since negotiations are continuing. But given its focus on farm goods, financial services market access and intellectual property protection, it likely will not create even that many factory jobs, economists and trade analysts say.”

Washington Post: “But whatever its achievements, Trump’s trade strategy has come at some cost. The administration has earmarked $28 billion to compensate farmers who have lost sales because of China’s retaliatory tariffs. Hundreds of companies have had production plans disrupted while they seek government waivers from the tariffs.”

Trump already said he had reached an agreement with China in principle more than two months ago, and then for weeks he’s lied to farmers that China had already begun to buy $50 billion worth of U.S. agriculture.

New York Times: “Mr. Trump announced in October that the United States and China had reached an agreement in principle on the first phase of a trade deal. But in the weeks since, a concrete agreement had proved elusive as the two countries continued to grapple over its precise terms.”

TRUMP: “We just made a deal for our farmers, where $40 billion to $50 billion of agricultural products are going to be bought by China. And they’re going to start now before we even sign the agreement. They’ve already started.” [Hannity, Fox News, 10/21/19]

TRUMP: “Thanks to my tariffs, we will soon have over $100 billion from a country that didn’t want to do anything with us, and I will tell you they started buying our farm product; you see that. They started buying a lot of our product even before the deals are done.”

The White House has previously been burned by Chinese promises to buy agriculture, and neither the U.S. or Chinese have repeated the dollar figures Trump promised two months ago.

Wall Street Journal: “Missing from both sides was a reference to how much additional American farm products or other goods China will purchase as a part of the limited pact.”

Politico: “FARMERS AWAIT PROMISED PURCHASES FROM CHINA: One day before Trump sat down with Chinese President Xi Jinping last month at the G-20 gathering in Osaka, Japan, the Agriculture Department announced that China had bought 544,000 metric tons of U.S. soybeans — its largest purchase since March.  But no new sales have been announced since, despite Trump’s promise that China would buy large amounts of agricultural goods from U.S. farmers ‘almost immediately’ as the two sides relaunched trade negotiations.”

Farmers have remained skeptical after repeatedly being lied to about Chinese agriculture purchases.

“We have to see it through. We have to see it loaded and shipped out.” – North Dakota farmer

“We get this new story that we’re going to have this great deal as we had back in the spring, and then the Chinese went home, and a week later, it went away. Then we didn’t have negotiations for several months, so once bitten, twice shy. We obviously have to wait and see.” – Missouri farmer

“I’m not going to vote for the president, and I’m on record for saying that. He could come up with this $50 billion, he could walk across my pond and not get wet, and I’m still not going to vote for him because, you know, at the end of the day my name is Chris Gibbs, it’s not Judas, and I’m not going to sell my political moorings for 30 pieces of silver.” – Ohio farmer