Who’s gonna fight harder for manufacturing jobs?
On Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gave a speech on trade policy. He came out swinging, and in a decidedly different way than what you’d expect from your standard-issue Republican presidential nominee.
Trump cited Alexander Hamilton and Bernie Sanders; promised an immediate withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal; and vowed to name China a currency manipulator. He was so firmly and resolutely trade-skeptical in his remarks that it’s hard to find an excerpt from it that would encapsulate all of it.
But wait! Here’s a good one:
America became the world's dominant economy by becoming the world's dominant producer. The wealth this created was shared broadly, creating the biggest middle class the world had ever known.
But then America changed its policy from promoting development in America, to promoting development in other nations.
We allowed foreign countries to subsidize their goods, devalue their currencies, violate their agreements, and cheat in every way imaginable. Trillions of our dollars and millions of our jobs flowed overseas as a result.
He laid the blame for all of this at the feet of – you guessed it – Hillary Clinton:
The people who rigged the system are supporting Hillary Clinton because they know as long as she is in charge nothing will ever change.
The Clinton campaign was having none of it. It immediately put out the following statement:
In yet another attempt to add some carefully scripted details to his campaign, Trump beefed up his rhetoric with some surprisingly familiar new specifics on trade enforcement. While much of his speech was the same old bluster, there were a few places he got specific—and they were ideas that seem to have moved straight from Hillary Clinton’s policy fact sheets to his teleprompter.
Trump’s trade policy ideas, the Clinton camp says, come “straight from Hillary Clinton's policy fact sheets.” Whoa. It’s almost as if the presidential candidates from America’s two major political parties were trying to establish themselves as the bigger trade skeptic. Is this Bizzaro World?
This tit-for-tat was remarkable, and we weren’t the only ones to notice. A news analysis that ran in the New York Times put it thusly:
Presidential candidates vow every four years to do more to help American workers facing competition from abroad. After taking office, they have consistently pursued more conciliatory trade policies toward China, seeing a strategic benefit to warm relations with Beijing.
But broad political distress this year over the loss of well-paid working class jobs to global competition, coupled with mounting concern about China’s increasingly assertive military posture, suggest that the next president could actually follow through on the pledges.
Call me cynical, but I’ll believe that when we see it. Meanwhile, the brewing fight between Hillary and Donald over whom is tougher on trade is one that we’re welcome to see. The Alliance for American Manufacturing holds a nuanced view on a number of issues facing manufacturers, including the TPP – we don’t believe it will be the excellent agreement it’s purported to be until it includes binding language to combat currency manipulation.
Nevertheless, the more these two wrassle over trade, the more detailed their debate will become.
To be fair, Hillary Clinton has laid out specific policy proposals to bolster American manufacturing and can point to decades of life in elected office to display a pro-manufacturing track record (some of her moments have been better than others). We can expect a complex view of trade policy, with a lot of shades of gray, from a Clinton White House
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has built his freewheeling campaign around trade skepticism, but as a relative political neophyte he’s got no record to stand on – save for the outsourced Trump-branded clothing he's sold as a private businessman. When it comes to trade policy, Trump asks us to take him at his word, and his word suggests an administration that would see trade in very black and white terms.
Whatever happens – and whatever the powers-that-be think – voters are concerned about trade and they’re concerned about manufacturing jobs. This issue isn’t going away, nor should it.