The Scoop
A godfather of President Donald Trump’s tariffs said on a private call with Wall Street investors that the US should quickly strike a trade deal with Japan, whose officials he expected to explicitly link White House support for the sale of US Steel to any talks.
Robert Lighthizer, who was Trump’s first-term trade czar and remains an influential voice in trade policy even without a role in this administration, spoke Monday to clients of Citigroup, according to participants. “We should strike a deal with them,” Lighthizer said of Japan, which he called a “great” trading partner.
Lighthizer opposes the sale of US Steel to Tokyo-based Nippon, but told the group he would be “flabbergasted” if Japan didn’t try to make its approval a condition of any trade deal. In a statement to Semafor, he said: “I am against this deal and do not think it is in our national interest.”
Lighthizer is a China hawk who served as US Trade Representative from 2017 to 2021. His insights have been a hot commodity in recent weeks as the White House sends conflicting signals and the retaliatory math gets more complicated. Current USTR Jamieson Greer was Lighthizer’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration, and the pair are former law-firm colleagues.
Politico reported Friday that Lighthizer, in a private speech to Canadian conservatives, urged them to increase defense spending as a way to repair the country’s fraught relationship with Trump.
“Nippon Steel are not a bunch of boy scouts,” Lighthizer said in 2023, shortly after the deal was announced. As a lawyer at Skadden, he helped US Steel fight imports of cheap steel from, among others, Nippon.
Citi declined to comment.
In this article:
Know More
Nippon agreed in 2023 to buy US Steel for $14 billion. Trump has threatened to block the deal on national security grounds, but it is seen as a pawn in trade talks that have already begun. The Japanese company, which has the support of US Steel’s union, has also offered — separately, or together as part of any takeover — to invest billions of dollars upgrading US Steel’s technology, which it says will help the company compete globally.
This weekend brought a bleak warning for what might happen if it can’t: The British government was forced to step in and nationalize the UK’s last steel plant, which was sold to a Chinese company in 2020 and had been losing the equivalent of $920,000 every day.
The View From Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba
“The difference between acquisition and investment must be carefully examined in light of the U.S. law, but there must surely be a point where it (U.S. Steel) remains as an American company, and where Japanese interests can also be realized,” Ishiba told Japan’s Parliament in Monday remarks translated by Reuters.