And yet, for more than a decade, those same trade deals helped Mr. Ross amass a fortune across the globe — in countries like Mexico and China, among others. In fact, Mr. Ross has sometimes invested overseas in ways that Mr. Trump condemns.
.. As the head of an auto parts company, Mr. Ross shipped jobs to Mexico, taking advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he now says is unfair and must be renegotiated. That company, along with a textile firm he founded, publicly stated that Mexico was central to their growth.
.. “As a private businessman, Mr. Ross made pragmatic decisions based on the rules of the road at the time , and it is precisely his knowledge of how trade deals work that will allow him to be successful in renegotiating bad deals like Nafta,
.. in 2006, Mr. Ross announced plans to open an $80 million state-of-the-art cotton plant in Vietnam that would employ 1,500 workers. It was one of many business decisions Mr. Ross made over the years that seemed to depart from Mr. Trump’s stance against free-trade deals and the migration of jobs overseas.
.. But he began transferring work to Mexico in the early days of his business. When Mr. Ross acquired an auto parts factory in Carlisle, Pa., a decade ago, he took a hard line with the union, demanding cuts in wages and benefits worth between a quarter and 30 percent of workers’ earnings
.. “Wilbur Ross — there’s no way he cares about the worker,” said Stacey Foltz, who worked at the plant for 10 years. “He made billions of dollars taking jobs out of the country.”
Trump’s Economic Team of Rivals
The incoming president’s advisers are all over the ideological map.
Summing up his life lessons, he encouraged the students to lean in: “Everything I’ve done in my career, and everything that most of you have done to this point, is to take risks.”
.. During an interview on CNBC the day of his appointment, Mnuchin said his top priorities were tax reform and rolling back the Dodd-Frank Act – not exactly what all those voters demanding the return of lost industries in middle America were clamoring for.
.. Seeing China as an economic paper tiger (or dragon as the case may be), he also believes that the Beijing government is weaker than it seems and susceptible to pressure and coercion. Hence he is supportive of retaliatory tariffs and other measures designed to “level the playing field.”
.. The plan has four pillars: “tax cuts, reduced regulation, lower energy costs, and eliminating America’s chronic trade deficit.” But trade is their real passion: They honed in on the entry of China into the World Trade Organization, which they said “opened America’s markets to a flood of illegally subsidized Chinese imports, thereby creating massive and chronic trade deficits” and “rapidly accelerated the offshoring of America’s factories
.. “Either you believe in markets, or you believe in government,” Kudlow has said.
.. Something’s got to give. How to square deregulation with abiding by environmental standards, as Cohn favors? How to square tariffs on imports designed to boost domestic production (Navarro and Ross) with the free flow of capital (Kudlow)? How to balance deconstructing Obamacare without price gouging and chaos in the health-care system that will surely hurt the working class that supported Trump? How to balance punitive tariffs with affordable goods? How to start mini-trade wars without the costs falling on, say, Walmart shoppers? How to juxtapose tax cuts that will benefit the 1% with the need to boost wages and employment for millions of disgruntled workers and unemployed who see Trump as a best last chance to turn things around?
The answer is that you can’t. If Trump’s goal is to create tension and conflict and see who emerges bloodied but victorious from the fighting, he’s setting up one hell of a battle.
.. Faced with competing and irreconcilable voices, it will be up to Trump to play the referee. That can take the form of active deliberation with his advisers, or passively waiting it out until someone emerges on top of the bureaucratic scrum. It’s certainly a recipe for a White House of conflict; whether it’s a recipe for sound and coherent economic policy is entirely another matter.
Trump’s Cabinet
On economic policy, Wilbur Ross is a known quantity and promises to be among the most influential Commerce Department heads in history. I expect whoever Trump picks as Trade Representative to be a similarly forceful character. But the big question is what Steve Mnuchin wants, or believes, which is something nobody really knows. If the answer is “nothing much” — which is very possible — then we can expect a Trump administration to rubber-stamp whatever Paul Ryan delivers him.
.. Appointing Betsy DeVos to Education is an indication that Trump has no particular plans for that department, and is happy for it to become a conservative ideological playground, whereas appointing Jeff Sessions as Attorney General is an indication that he intends to follow through as much as possible on a purely law-and-order approach to questions of policing, immigration enforcement, etc.
Verbruggen describes this as Trump choosing by issue whether to tack in a movement-conservative or populist direction; I’d say he’s picked people who matter for departments he cares about, and for departments he doesn’t care about he’s chosen people who don’t matter.
.. The big domestic policy question mark is whether Trump intends to keep his respective promises to repeal Obamacare and to protect Medicare and Social Security from cuts. Paul Ryan wants to help him keep the first promise and break the second.