Trump’s trade guru plots an even more disruptive second term

Former President Donald Trump’s administration was not exactly known for its bipartisan overtures. So when Trump’s top trade official, Robert Lighthizer, rounded up his staff one day in 2019 for a pilgrimage to Capitol Hill to meet with veteran Democratic Rep. John Lewis, it caught many of his own aides by surprise.

“We’re not talking about trade,” one of the participants recalled Lighthizer saying.

Lighthizer and a number of staff from the U.S. Trade Representative’s office ended up spending two hours with the Civil Rights icon — who died the following year — as he recounted his experiences in the March on Washington and the infamous Bloody Sunday encounter on Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge. A forthcoming vote on Trump’s reworked version of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which they needed Democratic votes to pass, did not come up.

At the time of the meeting, many lawmakers of both parties were still skeptical of the rewritten NAFTA — and the radical turn against decades of free trade orthodoxy that Trump and his trade chief had been pursuing. But months later, the Georgia Democrat took to the House floor to stump for the trade deal, helping it pass with the biggest margin of any trade agreement in U.S. history. That outreach is just one example of how Lighthizer curried favor with ostensible political rivals to win support for a dramatic shift in U.S. trade policy — one of the most enduring legacies of Trump’s first term.

If Trump wins in November, Lighthizer is poised to pursue an even more disruptive set of policies next year, one that is already raising alarms in foreign capitals, on Wall Street and among many economists.

According to four former Trump officials, granted anonymity to speak about sensitive personnel issues, Lighthizer is a candidate for a number of senior roles in a second Trump administration, from Treasury or Commerce secretary to a second turn as USTR, or as an economic adviser or even White House chief of staff. His profile rose further last month with the selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as Trump’s running mate, a committed protectionist who aligns with Lighthizer ideologically.

If Lighthizer returns, it would make him one of the rare Trump Cabinet officials to earn an encore performance. Even rarer, he is one who has friends on both sides of the aisle. Lighthizer’s knack for staying in the good graces of a notoriously mercurial boss and his ability to appeal across the political spectrum help explain his outsize influence during Trump 1.0. And they are why he’s likely to have a similar impact in a second Trump White House.

“His stock has always been high with people like me and the president,” Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, told POLITICO on Capitol Hill last month. “It’s too early to tell what the next administration may or may not do, but Bob Lighthizer is a good man.”

Lighthizer, however, isn’t pitching himself around Washington. Another one of his assets in the first Trump administration, say three people with knowledge of his work, was that he didn’t seek personal glory and instead focused on his agency without taking attention away from the boss. That helped him not only survive a turbulent Trump term, but thrive in the high-scrutiny environment that saw many of his colleagues dismissed.

“I don’t think Bob really had any enemies in that administration,” said one former Trump official who worked closely with Lighthizer. “He stayed in his lane.”

Lighthizer declined to comment for this article.

Even Democrats on Capitol Hill, who fought Trump doggedly on other policies, often found common ground with Lighthizer, who honed his coalition-building skills as an aide to former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole in the 1980s. Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who worked extensively with Lighthzier during the NAFTA rewrite in 2019, credits that experience with teaching Lighthizer how to deploy old-school Senate collegiality to great effect.

“What he sought to do is take what he learned during the Dole years — because he was a very senior person and and very influential during that time — and tried to find a way to kind of upgrade what his approach was for the times,” Wyden said in a Capitol Hill interview. “He was one of the Trump officials who actually used his previous life, his previous background in a way that made him relevant.”

Lighthizer “leaned into Democratic priorities” during the NAFTA renegotiation, added Rep. Richard Neal , who led the House Ways and Means Committee at the time. “I developed a trusting relationship with him.”

Leaders on Capitol Hill say that Lighthizer’s direct line to the president — and the trust Trump put in him — also made him more effective in dealing with both U.S. lawmakers and foreign governments.

“You felt that he had access to the key people in the Trump administration, including the president,” said Wyden, “and he had the knowledge and experience to use that information.”

But even some lawmakers who like Lighthizer personally, like Neal and Wyden, are wary of his more aggressive second-term agenda, which many economists warn could spike inflation and threaten the American economy’s leading role among world nations.

Those plans, including higher tariffs across the board and moves to decrease the value of the U.S. dollar, entail “an awful lot of risk without a proper assessment,” said Neal.

Many foreign governments were not on such friendly terms with Lighthizer during the Trump administration, and his proposals for reordering world trade flows would only further alienate many of them, including partners in North America and Europe. Lighthizer was “not interested in cooperating with allies,” said a representative for one U.S.-allied government, granted anonymity to speak freely about the trade chief. Foreign governments can expect “even harder times with him” if Trump wins reelection, the official added.

But not every foreign official has such negative impressions of Lighthizer’s actions under Trump. Kenneth Smith Ramos, who led negotiations for the Mexican government during the NAFTA revisions, remembers bonding with Lighthizer over a mutual love of Georgetown basketball and said his personableness “helped facilitate” the talks when things got tense.

Lighthizer’s strategy throughout, Ramos said, was to propose dozens of “very extreme” provisions and then allow most of them to be pared back over time, preserving his few true priorities.

“Obviously we had rough moments” during the negotiation, Ramos said. “But I think he developed a good relationship with me, as well as with my boss, the Minister of the Economy Ildefonso Guajardo.”

Canadian officials said much the same about Lighthizer’s relationship with then-Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, now the deputy prime minister. Though the negotiations had “difficult moments,” said one Canadian delegation member, granted anonymity to discuss the confidential talks, Freeland and Lighthizer “remain on good terms and have been in touch throughout the years.”

Despite earning a public persona for ideas that have made him a pariah among free traders in both parties, Lighthizer’s negotiations have turned out to be some of the most lasting policies from the Trump era. While President Joe Biden has sought to roll back most of Trump’s actions — including on the environment, health care and immigration — he has preserved and, in some cases, even extended his predecessor’s trade policies. That includes strengthening Trump-era tariffs, zealously enforcing the USMCA, cracking down on Chinese tech firms and opposing the sale of large American companies, like U.S. Steel, to foreign firms.

“I just think the truth is [the policies] work,” said Sen. Josh Hawley , one of Lighthizer’s allies on Capitol Hill, “and the proof of that is … that an administration of another party that is very hostile to all things Trump and Republican has kept the bulk of the Lighthizer policies in place.”

Not everyone agrees. Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss , a rising Democratic lawmaker who serves on the House Select Committee on China, said naming Lighthizer to a senior economic post in the next administration would be a “disaster.”

“In his testimony to the [China committee] he talked about trade as literally a zero-sum game,” Auchincloss said. “It’s a middle school understanding of specialization in exchange. So having him at the helm is a recipe for higher prices and inflation.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats are seizing on that message to argue that Lighthizer’s policies are well outside the mainstream and risk destabilizing not just the U.S., but economies around the world.

Lighthizer, according to three former Trump officials, has helped shape the campaign’s double-down approach to tariffs in the 2024 election, including Trump’s 10 percent across-the-board tariff proposal and much higher duties on Chinese imports. Lighthizer has also been devising plans to weaken the value of the U.S. dollar as a way to boost U.S. exports, an issue Trump alluded to in a recent interview .

The Harris campaign is already hammering Trump on those plans, pointing to assessments like one from Moody’s, which predicted in June that a Trump victory would mean “higher inflation and weaker economic growth,” largely due to tariff and immigration policies.

“It’s also Trump’s [first term] record in a nutshell,” said Harris spokesperson James Singer — “policies that closed factories, sent jobs overseas, and helped only billionaires and corporations while weakening our economy.”

While the details of those policies may change if Trump wins, the core ideas are Lightihzer’s handiwork, say the three former administration officials with knowledge of their conversations. But the former trade chief is almost certain to face resistance from inside a new Trump White House.

Back in Trump’s first term, Lighthizer’s policy agenda often ran up against Wall Street allies in the administration, like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who pushed back on Lighthizer’s more ambitious trade efforts. This time around, Trump is surrounding himself with a new crop of finance-oriented advisers, like hedge fund manager John Paulson, who is reportedly under consideration for Treasury Secretary along with Lighthizer, and would be sure to fight the former trade chief’s more ambitious policy proposals, like devaluing the U.S. dollar.

Those weak dollar policies, a former Trump official told POLITICO earlier this year, “would only happen if Bob [Lighthizer] was the Treasury secretary.”

That role is an open question, as are other economic posts in a potential second Trump administration. The former trade chief would be over 80 by 2028, when the next presidential term comes to a close. And some of those close to Lighthizer are dubious about whether Trump would tap him for the top economic job, even though he holds deep respect for the former trade chief.

The former president “likes Bob, and respects him,” said the first former Trump administration official. But “at the end of the day Trump is not going to give that [Treasury job] to Bob. He’s going to want a business person.”