Trump’s Mantra to ‘Buy American’ Apparently Doesn’t Apply to Trump Properties

Despite the president’s ‘tough stance’ on trade with China, since September of last year, Trump properties in the United States have imported products from Beijing.

FLORIDA — President Donald Trump has made the United States’ ongoing trade war with China one of the cornerstones of his presidency, promising to eliminate the trade deficit with China and bring manufacturing back stateside.

During his discourses he has frequently berated former President Barack Obama’s administration and, in particular, presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden for what he has called their “terrible deals” with Beijing. The president even went so far as to say that Biden’s “entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party” and called it “devastating for the American worker.”

RELATED: Trump Considered Selling Puerto Rico. We Asked an Expert If He Can Do That.

By Executive Order

To further push his agenda, in April 2017 Trump signed an executive order mandating that federal agencies “Buy American.” This was followed in January 2019 by another executive order, this time on “Buy-American Preferences” for infrastructure projects.

Later that year, in July, Trump signed a third executive order on “Maximizing Use of American-Made Goods, Products, and Materials,” and announced that his administration would enforce the Buy American Act of 1933 “to the greatest extent permitted by law.”

His mantra, Trump said during a press conference, is “Buy American, hire American.”

At Odds With His Message

But that is not what the president himself has been doing. According to a CNN report, since September of last year, as the president cast himself as tough on Beijing, Trump properties in the United States imported more than 8 tons of goods from China.

RELATED: Here’s How Praising Trump Could Cost Goya More Than a Boycott

These imports include more than 6 tons of tables delivered to Trump International Hotel in New York and 2 tons of wooden and glass showcase cabinets delivered to the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles.

A Loss for the United States

But despite the president’s “tough stance” on trade with China and the imposition of a 10% tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports, a report from Moody’s Analytics cited by CNN concluded that the trade war has done severe economic damage to the U.S. and global economies, and that “it has cost an estimated 0.3 percentage point in U.S. real GDP and almost 300,000 jobs.”

In fact, America’s farmers, among the country’s largest exporters and a key part of the president’s political base, soon became collateral damage of Trump’s trade war. Soybean, dairy and pig farmers saw their businesses dry up as China retaliated by imposing tariffs on more than $70 billion American products.