U.S. President Barack Obama arrives in Peru on Friday for his final Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting, but his presence will be overshadowed by someone who is not scheduled to attend until next year – his successor, President-elect Donald Trump. Trump has asserted during the campaign that the U.S.-led Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a “death blow” and a “rape of our country.” Trump’s surprise election less than two weeks ago destroyed any chance for the Congress this year to take up the trade pact and there is no indication the next administration would favor its ratification. “TPP is certainly dead for now,” said Deborah Elms, executive director of the Asian Trade Center in Singapore. Helping US workers Elms, a TPP proponent, told VOA she wishes Trump would see there is no better option for helping American workers than the 12-nation deal and that he will “killing the TPP means handing an early victory to China.” However the president-elect “is picking people like him who see the world as win-lose and who genuinely believe that trade agreements are why the U.S. runs a trade deficit,” Elms added. “You can't reason with such people.” TPP supporters are hoping that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in his Thursday meeting with Trump, can change the mind of the U.S. president-elect. Hours before the Abe-Trump private meeting in New York, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, at the APEC Ministers’ Meeting in Lima. The two have developed a close relationship and presumably there was a frank conversation about the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and its ramifications. Kerry and Kishida discussed “a full range of bilateral, regional and global issues, including DPRK, climate change and the importance of implementing the Paris Agreement, and trade,” State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement. For TPP to become a reality under the terms of the agreement, it must be ratified by Japan, the United States and four other countries. China in "driver's seat' If TPP is buried, then “China gets into the driver's seat in a way that they have not been before,” Elms predicted. APEC summit host Peru has already started talks with the Chinese about joining Beijing’s regional trade pact while clinging to hope Trump will change his mind. “We'll have to see how ambitious the pact is,” Peru Trade Minister Eduardo Ferreyros said of China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). “Even if it's not as deep as other agreements, we'll still participate.” Seven TPP countries are members of RCEP, which excludes the United States. Earlier in the week, Kerry told VOA and Reuters he is “not concerned at all” about China pushing its own economic agreements at the Lima meeting. “If China has a good idea, we should look at China’s good idea and see whether or not it makes sense for us, too,” Kerry said. “There’s no exclusivity here as far as I’m concerned, speaking for myself.”