Leaving the WTO would put the United States in the same company with North Korea, Iran, Syria and the few other nations still outside the 163-member organization. | AP Photo GOP leaders defend WTO after Trump threatens U.S. exit

Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw from the World Trade Organization over the weekend may help him win voters in Rust Belt states that Mitt Romney lost four years ago. But it had Republicans scrambling Monday to defend the Geneva-based guardian of fair trade.

House Speaker Paul Ryan “believes the WTO plays an important role of ensuring other countries meet their obligations and don’t violate agreed upon rules,” a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Republican told POLITICO in an email.


“Through the WTO, we have established the economic rules of the road based on our system, and other countries must follow them or face our retaliation,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady added in a statement. “While the WTO isn’t perfect, our membership in this organization is essential to making American products more competitive and attractive around the world.”

Trump's comments on Sunday came in response to a question from "Meet the Press'" Chuck Todd about the presidential candidate's proposal to punish companies, such as air conditioner manufacturer Carrier, that move jobs to other countries by taxing their exports back to the United States.

“If they're going to fire all their people, move their plant to Mexico, build air conditioners, and think they're going to sell those air conditioners to the United States, there's going to be a tax,” Trump said. “It could be 25 percent. It could be 35 percent. It could be 15 percent. I haven't determined. And it could be different for different companies.”

Tough rhetoric like that helped Trump clench the Republican nomination, and exposed deep frustrations with job losses caused by globalization, especially among older white male voters, even though the party has long been a supporter of free trade. The billionaire businessmen is hoping the same feeling will help him win key industrial states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania that could decide the outcome of the November election.

Asked by Todd whether his punitive tariff plan might be struck down by the WTO, Trump took an aggressive tone: “It doesn't matter. Then we're going to renegotiate or we're going to pull out. These trade deals are a disaster, Chuck. World Trade Organization is a disaster.”

Trump has also threatened to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership that the Obama administration still hopes Congress will approve this year despite the hostile trade environment, and to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Canada and Mexico agree to renegotiate the 22-year-old pact.

The attacks on trade liberalization, which is credited by the Peterson Institute for International Economics with raising household purchasing power by about $13,000 on average since 1950, have left longtime supporters dumbfounded.

“This is the ranting of an ignorant fool,” said Claude Barfield, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that advocates for free trade. “He clearly popped off without know anything about the WTO.”

Some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, continue to express a patient attitude and willingness to work with Trump.

"I understand his frustration with wanting to hold our trading partners accountable,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said in a statement. “But, there are better ways to do that, and I plan to work with him to ensure we use the most effective ways possible to advance our trade goals and grow our economy here at home.”

Hatch's remarks matched those he made several weeks ago when Trump harshly criticized U.S. trade agreements at a speech in Ohio.

But Ed Gerwin, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, called Trump’s punitive tariff proposal perplexing since it seems to suggest the creation of new government bureaucracy charged with determining duties on American companies, based on “some magic formula” having to do with job losses.

Still unclear, Gerwin said, is whether the duties would also apply to foreign competitors who ship similar products to the United States or if only American companies would be the victims of Trump’s ire. “It’s so incredibly poorly thought out,” he said.

The WTO was created in 1994, as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that governed global trade for nearly 50 years after World War II. But unlike the GATT, the WTO has a binding dispute settlement system that allows countries to bring their trade complaints before a neutral body for resolution.

Countries have filed more than 500 disputes at the WTO over the past 22 years, including 110 brought by the United States. Washington has also been on the receiving end of litigation in 126 cases and has sometimes had to change its legislation or face retaliation. A recent example is the Agriculture Department's rules to require country-of-origin labeling for beef and pork, which were withdrawn after a successful challenge by Canada and Mexico at the WTO.

Leaving the WTO would put the United States in the same company with North Korea, Iran, Syria and the few other nations still outside the 163-member organization.

Remaining members, which include China, India, Russia and the European Union, would be free to hike tariffs on U.S. goods, rip-off U.S. intellectual property, impose phony food safety restrictions, and illegally subsidize U.S. competitors without the United States being able to legally challenge those actions.

Trump’s critique of U.S. trade policy borrows heavily from union groups, who recognize they have more work to do in battleground states to persuade members not to fall sway to the former reality TV star’s rhetoric.

“The idea that somehow this man is a champion for fair trade and pro-worker trade policies is absurd,” Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO, told POLITICO. “If you poke just a little bit below the surface, you find that he offers no solution, no vision of how we ought to be involved in the global economy except that he’s going to put his CEO friends in charge of negotiating better deals.”

It’s one thing to criticize the WTO, which the AFL-CIO has done and will continue to do, but another to threaten to walk away from the rules-based trading system if the United States doesn’t get its way on one point, Lee added.

“The labor movement does believe in the rules-based system, we just want different rules. Trump doesn’t seem to believe in a rules-based system. He believes in a Trump-based system," Lee said.

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