Cutting rules, Trump tells execs

Tariffs up if jobs go, they also hear

President Donald Trump speaks with business leaders Monday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
President Donald Trump speaks with business leaders Monday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump on Monday morning welcomed leaders from several of the country's largest corporations and promised to wipe out at least 75 percent of government regulations that hinder their businesses, fast-track their plans to open factories and cut taxes "massively."

And he again threatened to impose a "substantial border tax" on companies that move production out of the country.


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"We're going to be cutting regulation massively," Trump told a group of business chief executives over breakfast, which was briefly open to the news media. "Now, we're going to have regulation, and it'll be just as strong and just as good and just as protective of the people as the regulation we have right now. The problem with the regulation that we have right now is that you can't do anything. ... I have people that tell me that they have more people working on regulations than they have doing product."

His visitors included leaders of companies that Trump has singled out on Twitter and in his speeches, including Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin and Mark Fields of Ford Motor Co. Also in attendance were Michael Dell of Dell Technologies; Jeff Fettig of Whirlpool; Alex Gorsky of Johnson & Johnson; Klaus Kleinfeld of Arconic; Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical; Mario Longhi of U.S. Steel; Elon Musk of SpaceX; Kevin Plank of Under Armour; Mark Sutton of International Paper; and Wendell Weeks of Corning.

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The meeting was well-received by many of the executives who attended.

Dow's Liveris said Trump "listened very carefully" about "how to actually get some action around fixing some of the issues that are embedded in creating American manufacturing jobs." And Fields of Ford Motor Co. called the meeting "very, very positive."

Trump said he hopes to convene this group at least four times a year to hear directly from the business community, saying they are "great people" who have done "an amazing job."

His message to them and other executives on Monday: Keep your production within the United States, and you will be rewarded. For those looking to grow or start new factories, Trump promised to expedite their requests and provide incentives to build.

Those who do not heed this advice, Trump said, could face new tariffs that he described as "substantial" and "major." This threat is one that many Republicans disagree with, for fear that it could increase prices for consumers and unfairly punish some companies. International trade experts said Trump may not have the authority to punish individual companies, while broad-based tariffs would violate existing treaties. Trump defended this proposed tax on Monday as "fair."

"And I just want to tell you: All you have to do is stay. Don't leave. Don't fire your people in the United States. We have the greatest people," Trump said.

TPP exit

Also Monday, Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, using one of his first actions in office to reject a centerpiece of the Obama administration's attempts to counter China and deepen U.S. ties in Asia.

For Trump, the move was a fulfillment of a central campaign promise. He has repeatedly cast the 12-nation trade pact -- which was eagerly sought by U.S. allies in Asia -- as detrimental to American businesses.

"Great thing for the American worker that we just did," Trump said in brief remarks as he signed a notice in the Oval Office.

Former President Barack Obama's administration spent years negotiating the Pacific Rim pact, though the mood in Washington on trade soured over time. Obama never sent the accord to Congress for ratification, making Trump's actions Monday largely symbolic.

Trump repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and start to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement on his first day in office. Although Trump was sworn in on Friday, he has said he considers Monday his first formal day in office.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership has been politically contentious since the presidential election. The proposal to withdraw from it has its fair share of critics.

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"TPP withdrawal will slow US [economic] growth, cost American jobs, & weaken US standing in Asia/world," Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet early Monday. "China could well be principal beneficiary."

Trump had also promised to take steps on his first formal day in office to begin renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, but that trade deal was not mentioned. He has said he will meet soon with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to discuss the agreement.

Renegotiating the the agreement, which governs trade with Canada and Mexico, may be more disruptive, experts said. It is unclear exactly what changes Trump would make to the existing agreement.

Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the White House would generally need to provide six months' notice before withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement, potentially clearing the way for new duties on Mexican imports. He cautioned that higher prices on goods from Mexico could also cause prices to rise for U.S. consumers. About 12 percent of U.S. imports come from Mexico.

Tariffs "might hurt Mexico more, but it would hurt the United States as well," Bown said.

Post-inauguration

On Monday, the new president and his team tried to regroup after a weekend dominated by his and his spokesman's statements about inauguration crowds and their complaints about media coverage of the celebrations.

Some of Trump's advisers had privately conceded that Trump's focus on inauguration crowds -- that is, his rejection of reports that his crowd was smaller than that of Obama's first inaugural -- was unhelpful on the opening weekend of his presidency.

Spokesman Sean Spicer, in Monday's briefing, made light of his weekend appearance in which he said reporters were trying to "lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration" by reporting numbers that were lower than those the White House reported. He conceded that he was relying on incomplete information when he used public transportation figures to boast about the crowd size, but stood by his claim that Trump's swearing-in was the most watched in history, counting Internet views as well as TV.

The crowd was shown in photos and video to be smaller than that in attendance of Obama's 2009 inauguration, though Trump denied that fact.

Trump, meanwhile, spent the day bounding from one room of the White House to another for meetings, often ordering aides to summon journalists from their West Wing offices for unscheduled statements and photo opportunities.

In addition to his executive action on the trade pact, Trump signed memorandums freezing most federal government hiring -- though he noted an exception for the military -- and reinstating a ban on providing federal money to international groups that perform abortions or provide information on the option.

The actions were among the long list of steps candidate Trump pledged to take on his opening day as president. But other day-one promises were going unfulfilled Monday, including plans to propose a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on members of Congress and terminating Obama's executive actions deferring deportations for some people living in the U.S. illegally.

Spicer said Monday that Trump intended to follow through on his proposals, though on a more extended time frame to ensure maximum attention for each move.

Yet he appeared to suggest that Trump would not move quickly to reinstate deportations for young immigrants protected from deportation under the Obama administration. Spicer said Trump's focus would be on people in the U.S. illegally who have criminal records or who pose a threat.

"That's where the priority's going to be, and then we're going to continue to work through the entire number of folks that are here illegally," he said.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also followed up on weekend comments, in which she said Trump would not make his tax returns public. "The White House response is that he's not going to release his tax returns," she said Sunday on ABC News.

On Monday, she tweeted that Trump is "under audit and will not release until that is completed." Her statement echoed the justification Trump has offered since February for not releasing his tax documents.

Later in the day, Trump said in a meeting with congressional leaders that 3 million to 5 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally voted in the election, costing him the popular vote, according to a Democratic aide familiar with the exchange who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting. No evidence has emerged to back up that claim.

Trump's assertions came in a White House meeting with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders. They were similar to claims he made on Twitter in late November that he had won the Electoral College in a "landslide" and "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes despite losing the Electoral College.

Information for this article was contributed by Jenna Johnson, Ylan Q. Mui, Amy Goldstein and David Nakamura of The Washington Post; by Julie Pace, Jonathan Lemire, Erica Werner, Ken Thomas and Jill Colvin of The Associated Press; and by Kevin Cirilli, Margaret Talev, Jennifer Jacobs, David Welch, Eric Martin, Sahil Kapur and Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 01/24/2017

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