Opinion | Democrats should talk more about Trumps failing, unpopular nationalism

It’s often observed that President Trump’s policies on trade and immigration are failing spectacularly. What’s observed less often is that much of this is rooted in the failure of Trump’s nationalist worldview.

Paul Krugman has a good column laying out three reasons why Trump’s trade war with China has not proven to be “good” and “easy to win,” as he predicted.

The first reason Krugman suggests is that those drawing up Trump’s trade policies do not appreciate that for other countries, the incentives might tilt against capitulating to Trump’s threats and bullying. Trump is strong and fearsome, so his threats simply must work! Except -- no.

The second reason is that the complexities of global supply chains mean that tariffs don’t just result in jobs moving back to America. Instead, they might get moved to countries other than the ones targeted by Trump’s tariffs, so the jobs aren’t necessarily roaring back due to these policies, as Trump vowed.

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And this is the third:

Finally, Trump’s trade war is unpopular — in fact, it polls remarkably poorly — and so is he.

This leaves him politically vulnerable to foreign retaliation. China may not buy as much from America as it sells, but its agricultural market is crucial to farm-state voters Trump desperately needs to hold on to. So Trump’s vision of an easy trade victory is turning into a political war of attrition that he, personally, is probably less able to sustain than China’s leadership, even though China’s economy is feeling the pain.

I’d like to add a nuance to this. While it’s certainly possible that Trump could still end up with a good deal with China in the end, it’s more likely that he will end up with either a bad deal or no deal. And there’s a political trap at work here.

Trump badly needs some kind of victory on trade heading into 2020. His increasing vulnerability on the issue doesn’t just mean China can wait him out. It also means that the domestic politics of this are working against Trump now, in a Gordian Knot kind of way.

That is, the pain from his trade wars, which is hitting his own constituencies, is pushing him towards accepting a bad deal. But at the same time, that pain also means that there will likely still be a political price to pay for accepting a bad deal, since it won’t have been worth all that pain.

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This is where the two other reasons offered by Krugman -- the belief that unilateral bluster and threats will bear fruit, and the complexities of global supply chains -- come back into the picture.

Trump campaigned on a vow to rip up our trade deals and grab China in his manly hands and shake it until it capitulated. Trump did renegotiate NAFTA, but the changes are minimal, precisely because upending deeply ingrained international trade relations threatened to be so destructive, and now Congress might not even pass the new version, which could force him to renegotiate it. Meanwhile, for all the reasons noted above, the trade war with China drags on without end.

Which is to say that Trump’s campaign bluster on trade has collided headlong with the complexities of domestic politics, international diplomacy, and the global economy. And the result has been -- to coin a phrase -- something close to “carnage.”

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This is likely what is rendering Trump’s trade agenda unpopular: Not just that it’s causing disruptions, but that it’s increasingly seen as out of touch with contemporary realities. It’s no accident that a recent Associated Press poll found not just that 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of trade with other countries, but also that 50 percent say free trade is good for the economy.

That’s been mirrored on immigration as well. Trump’s treatment of migration as something that can be dissuaded through suffering, cruelty and deterrence has been a monumental failure. And all the horrific imagery we’re seeing of the humanitarian disaster it has produced probably is playing some role in driving the percentages who see immigration as good for the country to a record high of 76 percent in Gallup polling.

It remains to be seen whether all of this means Trump will lose in 2020 -- he still retains the advantages of incumbency and the generally good economy, in spite of his policies. But it sure seems like there’s a big opening for Democrats to indict not just the individual failing policies we’re seeing, and all the pain and suffering and chaos they’re causing, but also the whole worldview underlying all of it.

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