Once more, President Shit-for-Brains has screwed up a sunset. In a move that will undoubtedly hit consumers in the wallet and prove to be a drag on an economy most presidents would give their eye teeth for, Trump's escalating trade war with China is a gift for Democrats heading into the 2020 election.
There's just one problem: Democrats are hardly in a position to capitalize on it. That's because the party's stance on trade, for the most part, lines up almost directly with Trump's. They are anti-free trade, are on record as being against both NAFTA and the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), and believe very strongly in punishing China. Kamala Harris, in an interview she did for CNN's State of the Union, said she would not have voted for NAFTA had she been in the Senate back then.
There's no doubt that China has been a bad actor when it comes to trade and intellectual property rights, and there's little disagreement among economists that if the West doesn't deal with them soon, it will be too late. But Trump's unilateral, go it alone approach, is hardly the answer. It isolates America from the kind of support needed to extract concessions from President Xi. And Trump's continued insistence that somehow the tariffs that are being imposed on Chinese goods are being directly deposited into the U.S. treasury is the kind of stuff that would make a first-year economic's student chuckle with laughter.
But when pressed, Democrats don't appear to have a coherent strategy that would hold China accountable without sabotaging the economy. That's because almost collectively they've bought into a long-discredited myth that NAFTA and the TPP are responsible for the job losses in the industrial Midwest. As I pointed out in a piece I wrote back in May of 2016, Robert Reich, who was a Bernie Sanders supporter, said that NAFTA on the whole "was a net positive for job creation."
The real problem isn't free trade but the lack of a system that helps displaced workers find comparably paying jobs. In a global economy there will always be winners and losers. It's how you deal with the losers that determines the overall strength of an economy.Yet throughout the 2016 campaign, the one thing both Sanders and Trump agreed on was how horrible NAFTA was and how it had to go, along with the TPP. Even front runner and eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was forced to abandon her husband's signature accomplishment just to appease the far Left.
And now the party that swallowed a lie has no viable economic argument to use against a president who is slowly undermining the last five decades of global expansionism, all because some flunky economist by the name of Peter Navarro told him it was possible to return to the '50s.
Seriously, what's their solution with respect to trade? We agree with Trump, but we just won't be as inept? Yeah, that'll really play well in Michigan and Wisconsin, not to mention Ohio, where Hillary got crushed and where Democrats are about as popular as a vegan at a steak house.
The fact is Democrats have boxed themselves into a corner when it comes to trade. They can't backtrack and suddenly become free traders because they'd be conceding the Rustbelt to Trump; and they can't do the old "kinder and gentler" anti-China, anti free trade bit because it makes Trump's point for him. I can just see Trump now: "Democrats say they'll be tough on China but they won't. They're just pussies." And, yeah, Trump would say that; he's said worse.
This is what happens when you adopt populist solutions to complex and far-reaching problems. Ever since Brexit, the West has been struggling to defend its policies to an ever increasingly frustrated segment of the population that is fearful of the future, contemptuous of the multiculturalism that is changing their world, and nostalgic for a return to a past where everything made sense.
Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump sold a bill of goods to a lot of gullible and vulnerable people, and in the process, they chartered a course for their respective countries that could well lead to severe financial hardships for both countries; hardships that will target the very people they claimed to champion the most. Johnson, thankfully, has been thoroughly discredited in the U.K., but Trump, despite his legal difficulties here in the U.S., remains a very real and potent threat. His base still loves him and his opposition has, thus far, failed to come up with an alternative to combat his brand of economic and cultural populism.
All of which could doom their prospects in 2020.
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