ANALYSIS: The Problem with Trump’s Populism: Trade is Good for U.S.

By Published on August 25, 2015

A great deal of Donald Trump’s silly and illiterate trade talk presupposes the gutting or repeal of NAFTA, the trade accord between the United States, Canada and Mexico that went into effect in 1994, with his dreams of punitive sanctions and blockades. Indeed, NAFTA is a favorite whipping boy for populists Left and Right, a reminder that populist conservatives have much more in common with populist progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders than they do with the political tendency that connects Adam Smith to F. A. Hayek and Ronald Reagan.

Trump fancies himself an ace negotiator, a skill that he has had some chance to hone in an embarrassing series of corporate bankruptcies, and he proposes to employ those skills to ensure trade that is “fair” by whatever ethical standards occur to this particular serial adulterer/crony capitalist/pathological liar/reality-television grotesque. While Trump himself is fundamentally unserious, the Right has witnessed a destructive reemergence of the old anti-trade populism articulated by Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot.

Perot was the Trump of the 1990s, a billionaire businessman with an absurdly high estimate of his own importance, though Perot at least had the distinction of having made his own fortune. It was Perot who famously warned of the “giant sucking sound” that would accompany U.S. capital shifting south if NAFTA were to pass. And as many election scholars figure it, it was also Perot who ensured the election of Bill Clinton, a previously obscure political figure if a gifted campaigner. Another billionaire megalomaniac ensuring the election of another Clinton would be almost pleasing in its symmetry if it weren’t for the fact that it would do tremendous damage to the country and the world.

Read the article “ANALYSIS: The Problem with Trump’s Populism: Trade is Good for U.S.” on nationalreview.com.

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