Sen. Ruben Gallego thinks Trump policies are weakening US leverage over China

PHOENIX – U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego said Wednesday he thinks President Donald Trump’s trade policies are weakening the nation’s position when it comes to China.

“We’ve shown China a really good example of how they’re going to be able to hurt us in the future,” the Arizona Democrat told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Mike Broomhead Show. “China said basically F you, and now they got their way.”

“At the same time, we weren’t able to coordinate our approach to China with Europe. So, they know that they’re going to be able to divide Europe and the United States.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that the ongoing showdown over tariffs is unsustainable and he expects a “de-escalation” in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

In addition, Trump said the final tariff rate with China would come down “substantially” from the current 145%.

Sen. Ruben Gallego underwhelmed by trade deals

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration has received 18 proposals from other countries for trade deals with the U.S.

Gallego questioned whether that’s enough progress to warrant the economic disruption created by Trump’s tariff policy, which the first-term Arizona senator described as “haphazard” earlier this month.

“When they started there was going to be 120 deals in X amount of days, and now we’re down to 18 notional deals, right? We haven’t seen any of this, right?” he said.

“But the other problem is that we’ve kind of established a pattern and a reputation with these countries that they’re not going to be very trusting of us.”

‘We shouldn’t be fighting with Canada’

Gallego believes the divisions Trump has created with traditional U.S. allies will hurt the country in the long run.

“What we may have gained in the short term, which I don’t think is as much as the president is saying, is really going to hurt us in the long term in terms of our ability to have real leverage against China,” he said.

Gallego agrees with the goal of getting businesses out of China and into the U.S., but he said that requires a strong economy.

“The only way that we’re going to have a very strong economy to be able to leverage all that is you have to have allies that are willing to join with you, right?” he said. “So, that means we shouldn’t be fighting with Canada. Canada, United States and the European Union should be all getting together and trying to pressure China together for them to change their policy.”

Gallego also expressed concern that foreign companies might be wary of doing business with the U.S. because of Trump’s unpredictability.

“There’s going to be a lot of companies that … are going to start looking for new domestic partners because they feel that at any point this president could just have a conniption and just change tariff laws,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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