#Joe Biden slams George W. Bush over NAFTA, despite his past support

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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden
Patrick Semansky/AP

Former Vice President Joe Biden slammed the George W. Bush administration for not carrying out its “commitment on NAFTA,” but did not address the fact that he voted for the Clinton-era trade agreement.

The Democratic presidential nominee was questioned during an interview on Wednesday about President Trump declaring NAFTA a failure and criticizing Biden for supporting it.

“What do you say to them and what do you say to the people who believe that?” Biden was asked by a reporter for FOX 2 in Detroit.

“What I say to that is, number one, the Bush administration did not keep its commitment on NAFTA, number one, and it was a mistake, number one,” he said, then went on to attack Trump’s claims that he brought manufacturing jobs to Michigan.

Biden didn’t mention that he voted to approve NAFTA in 1993 when he was a senator from Delaware.

It passed the chamber in a 61-38 vote.

The president has hammered Biden’s stance on trade deals that have allowed American jobs to migrate outside the US, trying to chip away at the Democratic candidate’s efforts to paint himself as pro-worker.

During his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Trump said Biden has “spent his entire career on the wrong side of history.”

“Biden voted for the NAFTA disaster, the single worst trade deal ever enacted; he supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, one of the greatest economic disasters of all time,” Trump said.

The president renegotiated NAFTA into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.Biden’s vote to approve NAFTA also hounded him during the Democratic presidential primary with some of the candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, who pointed out that he voted against the trade deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Biden also supported.

Biden responded to the criticism by saying he’s a “fair trader.”

“That’s why I’ve been arguing for a long time that we should treat other countries the way in which they treat us, which is, particularly as it relates to China: If they want to trade here, they’re going to be under the same rules,” Biden said during a 2019 campaign event in Iowa.