White House

A president who says he’s never had a drink finds himself consumed by a political uproar over alcohol.

President Donald Trump, a teetotaler who says he’s never even had a beer, finds himself in the awkward position of fiercely defending a Supreme Court nominee under harsh scrutiny for his past heavy drinking.

The more Trump embraces his embattled nominee and publicly comments on accounts that Kavanaugh drank to excess, the starker the contrast becomes — shedding light on what Trump on Monday called “one of my only good traits.”

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Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump denied that he was bothered by reports of Kavanaugh’s past drinking habits, which several former classmates have described as excessive.

“I remember my college days; everybody was drinking. It was, like, normal,” Trump said. “I was abnormal…. So I don’t see anything wrong.”

In booze-soaked Washington, where senators, lobbyists and White House staffers regularly drink stiff cocktails in wood-paneled downtown bars, Trump’s abstinence is a rarity — and a quality his aides are acutely aware of.

Current and former aides said they’ve never had the impression that Trump disapproves of their social drinking after work hours. Even so, some are mindful of his well-known dislike of alcohol.

Two former administration officials said lower-level campaign and White House aides were less likely to drink around the president or talk about drinking in his presence — not because Trump would berate them for it, but because, in the words of one of the former officials, they worried he could form “a lesser view of them.”

Several people close to Trump pointed to one incident in particular in which an administration official’s drinking did get under the president’s skin. Trump privately expressed annoyance when photos emerged last year of then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price drinking at a Capitol Hill bar as administration officials were trying to wrangle votes to overturn Obamacare.

While the president was mostly angry because he believed Price was shirking his duties, one former White House official said Trump’s “frustration was amped up 10 percent by the fact that he was at a bar.”

Trump has also suffered political headaches from other instances of alleged alcohol use. Last year, Marc Kasowitz, his first personal lawyer in the Russia investigation, stepped down soon after ProPublicareported he had recently struggled with alcohol abuse. The MSNBC host Joe Scarborough also claimed on-air earlier this year that Trump had expressed qualms about the drinking of his current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, before he hired the former New York mayor.

Trump’s aversion to drinking was instilled by his father and the struggle of his older brother, Fred, whose alcoholism contributed to his death at 43. That tragedy seared in Donald a belief that the vice could prevent him from climbing the ranks of the family’s business empire.

In public comments about his brother last year, Trump said “he had a problem with alcohol. And he would tell me, ‘Don’t drink.’” He later added: “And to this day I have never had a drink and I have no longing for it. I have no interest in it.”

While Trump has publicly spoken about his aversion to drinking — and even says he doesn’t like the taste of alcohol — people who have worked closely with him say he doesn’t dwell on the subject.

“It’s part of his persona,” said former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res. “But he never really talked about it.”

By his own account, it was a different story in his own household: “From the time my kids could practically speak I would say that: “No drugs, no alcohol, no smoking,” Trump told Forbes in 2010.

“I have a lot wealthy friends who have kids with great potential whose potential was destroyed because of alcohol and drugs. They got into the drug culture, the alcohol culture and it destroyed their mind for the long term,” he said.

The message didn’t entirely stick: In a 2004 interview with New York magazine, his son Don Jr. said that he “used to drink a lot and party pretty hard.” But he added that “about two years ago, I quit drinking entirely.” And in a 2015 interview with Don Imus, Trump said of his children, “I think they don’t drink.”

The roots of that thinking run deep, to the tragic life and early death of Trump’s brother Fred, whom he called last year a “great guy, best looking guy, best personality, much better than mine.”

“He saw how alcohol affected his brother, but even more he saw dad’s disapproval,” said Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, who wrote a book about the Trump family. “Donald wanted to take over the family business and it wasn’t hard to figure out that you shouldn’t do what dad didn’t like.”

Trump sometimes showed flashes of frustration with Freddy’s drinking and cavalier attitude. He scolded his older brother during a dinner with friends in the 1960s, encouraging him to buckle down and focus on work, according to The New York Times.

“He is bothered by anyone who shows weakness, so a person who is drunk, he would have been incredibly dismissive of and put off by,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-authored Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.”

But for Trump, there’s a big difference between a social drinker and a problem drinker, according to Schwartz. “A problem drinker is a person who is sloppy and out of control — and out of control is the worst thing you can be in Trump’s mind,” he said.

There are clear signs that Trump is willing to tolerate drinking in his presence, including his regular famous appearances at New York nightclubs like Studio 54 in the 1980s and 1990s. Trump has also owned numerous hotels and casinos where alcohol flowed freely to patrons — and he bought a winery in Virginia in 2011 that’s now run by his son, Eric. In the mid-2000s he even lent his name to a short-lived brand of vodka. (“It’s a great tasting vodka,” Trump declared at a launch party for the golden-bottled liquor, before noting that he was “very proud of the fact that I don’t drink.”)

Trump’s family has long profited off the sale of alcohol. His paternal ancestors were vintners in Germany and his grandfather, Frederick Trump, operated restaurants and other establishments that served alcohol to weary gold miners in the Northwest, an endeavor that helped build the nest egg that would eventually make Trump a household name, according to Blair, the Trump biographer.

Trump’s drink of choice is Diet Coke. Another former White House official recalled rarely ever seeing him consume anything but Diet Coke and — very occasionally — water. “He doesn’t drink anything else,” the former official said.

White House advance staffers make sure that Trump has plenty of Diet Coke on hand when he gives public toasts at events. But in an apparent slip-up, Trump toasted heads of state at the United Nations last year with what appeared to be wine. “Did teetotal Donald Trump drink wine at the UN?” a Telegraph headline asked. This year though, Trump toasted with Diet Coke.

(Confusingly, Trump seemed to dismiss the value of Diet Coke in a 2012 tweet in which he complained: “Let’s face it–this stuff just doesn’t work. It makes you hungry.”)

Kavanaugh’s high school and college drinking have became a central focal point in the partisan fight over his nomination, with some of his friends and acquaintances pushing back on the judge’s insistence that he never drank so much that he had lapses in his memory.

Democrats say that question is highly relevant as they assess whether he might have been capable of the high school and college-era sexual misconduct alleged by several women, including Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party when they were teenagers.

During his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Kavanaugh said he likes beer, but “did not drink beer to the point of blacking out, and I never sexually assaulted anyone.”

But even Trump expressed surprise at his drinking and even initially appeared to suggest that the judge had a problem with alcohol in his youth.

“I was surprised at how vocal he was about the fact that he likes beer,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “And he’s had a little bit of difficulty. I mean, he talked about things that happened when he drank. I mean, this is not a man that said that alcohol was — that he was perfect with respect to alcohol.”

But Trump appeared to soften his rhetoric in his Tuesday comments, depicting Kavanaugh’s behavior as par for the course.

“Everybody was drinking [in college] and they used to drink a lot of beer and there was nothing wrong,” Trump said. “I just didn’t choose to do that, but almost everybody else did so. I don’t see anything wrong.”

A White House official cautioned against parsing Trump’s language, noting that the president has said Kavanaugh’s youthful drinking shouldn’t keep him from serving on the Supreme Court.

The official downplayed Trump’s use of the word “difficulty” to describe Kavanaugh’s high school drinking, adding, “He’s just saying that the judge partied in high school and went on to do big things.”

As for himself, Trump suggests that booze would be his own undoing.

“I’ve never had alcohol,” he told reporters at the White House Monday. “Can you imagine if I had, what a mess I’d be?”

“I’d be the world’s worst,” he added. “But I never drank. I never drank. Okay?”

Trade

The U.S. is sending a message to its trading partners: You better be on our side in the trade war.

The fine print of the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement includes a provision that requires any country in the pact to give three months’ notice to other parties if it is entering into trade negotiations with a nonmarket economy, which the U.S. considers China to be. If one country enters into a deal with China or another similar economy, then that nation can be kicked out of the newly negotiated trade pact.

The language has President Donald Trump’s fingerprints on it, and represents an escalation in the China trade war by essentially pulling Canada and Mexico into the U.S. camp when it comes to trade with China. The clause represents a loyalty test that is expected to serve as a template for future U.S. trade agreements with other countries.

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“This clause is definitely aimed at making it more difficult for others to sign a free-trade agreement with China — or at least doing so on terms that the U.S. doesn’t find in its interests,” said Scott Kennedy, director of the Project on Chinese Business and Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

He predicted the Trump administration would seek to include similar language as it works on trade agreements with Japan, the European Union and the U.K. “This effort seems part of piece with the escalating tariffs, investment restrictions and export controls to build constraints against China one trading partner at a time,” he said.

White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow emphasized the significance of the provision, saying it sends a signal to China “that we are acting as one.”

“The continent as a whole now stands united against what I’m going to call unfair trading practices by you know who — it starts with a C and ends with an A,” he told reporters on Tuesday outside the White House.

The Canadian government has made a policy priority of diversifying trade away from its heavy reliance on United States markets. Asked how much influence the U.S. will have on any Canadian talks with China at a press conference Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said only that “we’re going to continue to engage in increasing our trade footprint around the world.”

Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland played down the significance of the measure, noting that any party to the agreement can leave for any number of reasons. “Each country should have the right to make a sovereign decision about whether it wants to remain in a trade agreement.”

However, the provision could complicate any attempt to open negotiation with China — something the Trudeau government had attempted last year.

The nonmarket economy clause did not receive much attention during the negotiations, but it was something Canada initially resisted. A senior Canadian official told POLITICO last month that the language was the No. 3 or 4 remaining sticking point in the negations at that time.

The provision was a major victory for the U.S., which was laser-focused on checking China’s “back door” reach across North America and dealing with Mexico’s auto industry, said Dan Ujczo, a Canada-U.S. trade attorney at Dickinson Wright. “That’s what NAFTA was about at the end of the day,” he said, and the inclusion of the language is “a message to the rest of the world.”

One of the turning points in the negotiations was when Trudeau visited China in December 2017 in hopes of launching trade talks with the nation — a trip that raised concerns in Washington.

“Given the worsening trade relationship with the U.S., Canada had wanted to explore a free trade agreement with China,” said trade consultant Eric Miller. However, the Trudeau team left Beijing without a commitment to begin work on a free trade agreement. Such a prospect looks unlikely now.

“The Trump administration crafted this provision very clearly as a way of putting pressure on Canada,” Miller said.

Don Campbell, a former Canadian deputy minister of Trade and NAFTA negotiator, agreed that the clause would prevent the Canadian government exploring free trade with China any time soon. “In the absence of this clause, they might have been a bit more bold in looking at it,” he said.

Some in Canada, however, see the provision as a challenge to the nation’s sovereignty. “It’s quite astonishing to see that in here. It’s unprecedented as far as trade agreements go,” said Rachel Curran, former director of policy to former Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper. “I don’t think free and fair trade with China is possible right now — but we should be making those decisions ourselves, not handing over the authority to make those decisions to the U.S. — which is essentially what we’ve done.”

Meanwhile, Mexico has also been working on extending its trade ties with China. China is now Mexico’s third-largest export partner, receiving $5 billion in goods in 2016. Mexico also imports almost 20 percent — roughly $70 billion — of its goods from China. Yet, Mexico City probably doesn’t view the provision as too bitter of a pill to swallow.

“There is absolutely no interest in Mexico, none whatsoever, to establish a free trade agreement [with China],” said Jorge Guajardo, who served as Mexico’s envoy to Beijing from 2007 to 2013. “We have a humongous trade deficit with China. They are killing us to use the words of President Trump.”

China’s trade ties have been growing, but to the detriment of Mexico, he said, adding that Mexico was the last country to support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. “I don’t think any of the three countries will lose anything from this and it just signals to China that they are cornered or isolated,” he said. “I thought it was brilliant, to be honest.”

European trade officials may see it differently though. Brussels has long treated China’s economic status with more sensitivity.

“I can’t see how a major economy would accept such Finlandization of their trade policy to the U.S.,” said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, a former Swedish trade diplomat who now serves as director of the European Center for International Political Economy, a Brussels based think tank.

He noted that Japan is already negotiating Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which included China, and speculated that Europe is probably destined to enter into some form of negotiation with China within a decade to offload its excess inventories of cars and industrial equipment.

Last year, the European Union approved legislation that scrapped the term “non-market economy” as it applied to China, but it still kept a method of calculating anti-dumping tariffs that accounted for China’s state-run economy.

Analysts perceived the U.S.’ insistence on the language as an attempt to create a new partnership hemming in China, much as the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership was intended to do when it was signed in 2016, before the U.S. withdrew from the pact.

Kotaro Tamura, an Asia fellow at the Milken Institute and a former senator and parliamentary secretary in charge of economic and fiscal policy in Japan’s cabinet office, said the new North American trade deal “will definitely be the [new] blueprint to contain China in terms of trade.”

“The U.S. will try to reach a similar agreement with other countries surrounding China, including Japan,” Tamura told the South China Morning Post, a POLITICO content partner.

Christine Loh, an adjunct professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, predicted the U.S.’ moves to form new trade alliances during its heated trade war with China would “change supply chains all over the world.”

Some industries, such as garment and shoe manufacturing, had already started to move out of China to other developing economies with lower labor, energy and rental costs, Loh noted. Chinese businesses have started to join the exodus, with the U.S.’ recent tariffs on Chinese goods the final blow to their ability to make a profit at home, the SCMP, a newspaper based in Hong Kong, reported.