CABINET/CHINA/JAPAN/MEXICO/POLITICS/TRADE: "That's what I want to bring to government. I want to bring the greatest people into government because we're way behind. We don't make good deals anymore. I say it all the time at speeches. We don't make the deals anymore. We make bad deals.
Our trade deals are a disaster. We have hundreds of billions of dollars of losses on a yearly basis — hundreds of billions with China on trade and trade imbalance, with Japan, with Mexico, with just about everybody. We don't make good deals anymore. So we need people that are smart. We need people that are successful. And they got successful because, generally speaking, they’re smart. And that’s what I put. I'm very proud of the cabinet. I think they’re doing very well. It's very interesting how it's going, but I think they're doing very, very well."
– “Donald Trump’s Press Conference, Annotated,” NPR.org, Jan. 11, 2017, Donald Trump, Transcript, 1/11/2017