Getty Trump orders imminent to renegotiate NAFTA, back out of TPP

President Donald Trump is wasting no time in moving forward on a signature campaign promise: renegotiating NAFTA. An executive order announcing his intent to reopen the decades-old deal is expected as soon as Monday morning.

Trump said at a ceremony to swear in a handful of senior White House staffers on Sunday that he had already been in touch with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto since taking office and will hold separate meetings with both leaders soon, according to a pool report. Two days earlier, the new administration had reiterated its plan on its website.


"Anybody ever hear of NAFTA?" Trump joked at the ceremony. "I ran a campaign somewhat based on NAFTA. But we're going to start re-negotiating on NAFTA, on immigration and on security at the border, and Mexico has been terrific, actually, terrific; and the president has been really very amazing. I think we're going to have a very good result for Mexico, for the United States, for everybody involved."

Trump is set to meet with Peña Nieto a week from Tuesday, on Jan. 31, to discuss the renegotiation, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Saturday. It was not clear when the meeting with Trudeau would be held.

The president also is expected to issue an executive order Monday to withdraw from the TPP, a massive 12-nation trade deal the Obama administration negotiated and hoped to ratify before leaving office. The deal is written in such a way that it is effectively dead without the participation of the United States and its huge economy.

Withdrawing from the deal will be welcome news to progressive Democrats and labor groups, some of whom Trump is scheduled to meet with at the White House Monday. But it is likely to anger the other 11 nations involved as well as more mainstream Republicans and economists, some of whom hoped Trump would simply leave the deal alone for a few years — leaving the door open for him or another president to pick it up later.