Trump told The New York Times in January that he favored a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, then denied ever having said such a thing. The Times produced the audio (that part of the conversation was on the record) in which Trump clearly backed the 45 percent tariff, risking a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
.. The third risk is to America’s reputation and soft power. Both Bush and President Obama worked hard to reassure the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims that the U.S. is not at war with Islam. Trump has pretty much declared war on all Muslims.
.. He is America’s Ahmadinejad.
.. As Mitt Romney notes, “This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”
.. Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who was a national security official in the Bush White House, noted that most Republicans are united in believing that President Obama and Hillary Clinton have damaged the United States and added to the burdens of the next president.
“Yet what Trump promises to do would in some important ways make all of the problems we face dramatically worse,”
Motor City Meltdown
I say, ‘Free trade, great,’ but not when they’re beating us so badly.
.. The Republican Party appears on the edge of collapse, and the raucous debate in Detroit did nothing to erase that impression.
.. If they can conceive of voting for Trump themselves, how will they ever convince Trump’s supporters that voting for Trump is unacceptable?
Patrick J. Buchanan The Civil War on the Right
Millions of conservatives and independents believe it was the Republican policies of the recent past that also failed America.
The Bush-Clinton-Obama trade policies produced the $12 trillion in trade deficits, which measures the net export of U.S. factories and manufacturing jobs, which explain the wage stagnation.
.. In short, it will be difficult for populists to unite with Beltway conservatives in 2016, when the former see the latter as part of the problem, not the solution.
What’s Our Duty to the People Globalization Leaves Behind?
That sounds pretty good, I said, except that employment in the Mexican auto sector rose to 589,000 from 368,000 during the same period, an increase of 60 percent. I’m happy that 221,000 more Mexicans got jobs, but let’s be honest: Absent open borders, many of those jobs would have been in America.
.. I have never forgotten a powerful article I read in Foreign Affairs in 2007 that called for huge tax redistribution, both as a moral matter and as a mechanism for ensuring political support for free trade. (The authors were hardly left-wing shills — one had served in the administration of President George W. Bush.)
That still sounds like the right idea to me.
It’s not only morally wrong to fail to help those on the losing end of globalization, but it will also end badly politically, as the ascendant candidacy of Donald J. Trump illustrates.