For all of Donald Trump’s seemingly un-Republican rhetoric on trade, much of his skepticism is actually found in the official party platform from the last presidential election. The GOP’s 2012 language is thoroughly anti-China, detailed in how a Republican president would approach the Asian nation, and emphatic that the United States have uncompromising—wait for it—negotiators. He wouldn’t have much reason to touch substantial chunks of it were he to secure the party’s nomination for president.
“This worldwide explosion of trade has had a downside … as some governments have used a variety of unfair means to limit American access to their markets while stealing our designs, patents, brands, know-how, and technology—the ‘intellectual property’ that drives innovation,” the platform document reads. “The chief offender is China, which has built up its economy in part by piggybacking onto Western technological advances, manipulates its currency to the disadvantage of American exporters, excludes American products from government purchases, subsidizes Chinese companies to give them a commercial advantage, and invents regulations and standards designed to keep out foreign competition.”
Here’s the kicker, complete with a Trumpian buzzword: “The [Obama] Administration’s way of dealing with all these violations of world trade standards has been a virtual surrender.” (Per Reuters UK, Trump’s campaign put out a statement reading that “U.S. trade policy constitutes ‘unilateral economic surrender.'”)
The very next sentence would almost certainly be a keeper, too:
“Republicans understand that you can succeed in a negotiation only if you are willing to walk away from it.”
Trump’s official position and the GOP platform both call for a crackdown on counterfeit goods and China’s currency manipulation under penalty of the U.S. imposing countervailing duties, or tariffs to offset the subsidies China provides to their exporters. Although Trump goes further in demanding that China raise their labor standards for working conditions and vowing to act unilateraly in the event that the World Trade Organization dithers, there’s tremendous overlap.
Granted, not everywhere. Given his critical statements about such trade agreements as NAFTA, Trump would possibly take issue with the party platform’s praise of the free trade pacts negotiated since the Reagan presidency. And in 2012, the GOP was bullish on completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and providing the president “fast-track” authority to negotiate it, meaning that Congress could not amend the agreement once submitted. Trump has been critical of both the eventual substance of TPP and the process used to get there.
But is there any real doubt Trump would want to allow Congress to touch the deal—any deal—that he negotiates? Make Donald Trump president, and he’d make fast-track trade authority great again.
The real concerns about Trump’s trade agenda aren’t about what he’d subtract from the official Republican approach, but what he’d add to it. His vow to punish companies that set up shop overseas is economically insular, and he sounds stuck in the 19th century with his insistence that the U.S. trade imbalance—how much we export versus import—is harmful by definition. The full picture of his trade vision looks great on a daguerreotype. Not so much in modern technicolor.
Were it to come to fruition, he’d set Republican policy on trade back by nearly a century, one economist told the New York Times. If it’s any consolation, at least his starting point wouldn’t look so out of place.
