President Donald Trump has instructed his economic team to examine whether the U.S. should rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact from which he withdrew and once described as a “rape of our country.”
Following a meeting with the president on agriculture and trade Thursday, Republican lawmakers said the president committed to deputizing National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to “take a second look” at the possibility of re-entering TPP, a trade deal comprised of a dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, Mexico and Japan, that was struck under President Obama.
“This whole trade thing has exploded,” Kudlow told the New York Times in an interview Thursday. “There’s no deadline. We’ll pull a team together, but we haven’t even done — I mean, it just happened a couple hours ago.”
White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters later confirmed the president had asked Kudlow and Lighthizer to “take another look at whether or not a better deal could be negotiated.”
Late Thursday night, the president tweeted the U.S. would only considering re-joining the deal if it “were substantially better” than the deal that was negotiated by the Obama administration.
The new talk of considering re-entry into TPP comes as the president is set to meet with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago next week. The two are expected to discuss trade and the president’s expected meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
Within his first week in office, the president signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the pact, after consistently railing against it on the campaign trail.
“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster, done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country. Just a continuing rape of our country. That’s what it is too,” he said at a 2016 campaign rally in St. Clairsville, Ohio.
ABC News' Alex Mallin contributed to this report.