Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is based on two issues: immigration and trade. And there’s a significant difference between the two. On immigration, Trump capitalized on existing opposition to illegal immigrants. But on trade, he not only created a wave of anger over trade treaties, he gave birth to an antitrade majority.
It’s a remarkable achievement for a first-time presidential candidate with skimpy knowledge of issues who is often hardpressed to discuss details. Yet he has managed to turn public opinion against free trade, especially among Republicans. For roughly a half-century, unfettered trade has been one of the GOP’s cherished positions. But no more.
Trump has been harping on the downside of trade since he announced his candidacy in June 2015. In the first televised debate among Republican presidential candidates in Cleveland last August, he said political correctness was a “big problem.” That led him to raise the trade issue.
“We don’t win anymore,” Trump said. “We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.” Since then, he’s repeated this theme in every debate and made it a major element of his stump speech.
Polls reflect the Trump-inspired change. Pew Research found that support for free trade fell dramatically in 2016 among Republicans, dropping from 53 percent in 2015 to 39 percent this year. “Criticism of trade deals in general is particularly strong among Republican and Republican-leaning supporters” of Trump, Pew’s Bruce Stokes said.
The antitrade sentiment is not limited to Republicans. In a Bloomberg poll in March, 65 percent of adults said American trade policy “should have more restrictions on imported foreign goods to protect American jobs.” Asked if the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ratified in 1993 “has been good or bad for the U.S. economy,” 29 percent said good. Forty-four percent said bad.
Not to belabor the point, but only 27 percent in a CNBC poll in March said free trade has “helped the economy,” while 43 percent said it has hurt. “We’re in a clear era where people are more likely to think that trade hurts and a lot of that probably can be attributed to the likes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders,” said pollster Jay Campbell.
Trump, however, has had a greater influence on the public’s view of trade than Sanders has. It’s a bigger issue to Trump, an indispensable part of his political profile. He dwells on it far more than Sanders does. And trade is more critical to his success as a candidate than it was to Sanders’s surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton.
More than any of his GOP rivals, Trump recognized the power of the trade issue. He read Rick Santorum’s book Blue Collar Conservatives a year before he entered the race. “We need to examine our trade policies,” Santorum wrote. “We have to look at the effect of free trade on the average person. . . . Are existing trade laws fair and properly enforced?” Trump concluded they aren’t.
When he met with Santorum in September 2014, Trump had begun to hone his attack on the trade policies of Republican and Democrat administrations. He told Santorum that China and Mexico were taking advantage of America. “They’re killing us.”
Trump’s trade agenda was put in coherent form in his speech on June 28 in Monessen, Pennsylvania. It was called “Declaring America’s Economic Independence.” The speech, delivered from a text, was impressively argued and spiked with details. He didn’t ad lib or digress, as he routinely does in speeches at rallies.
Within days, he had a famous convert, Newt Gingrich, a longstanding advocate of free trade and critic of protectionism. “I basically agree with Trump’s speech on trade,” Gingrich told Politico. Gingrich is a leading candidate to be Trump’s vice presidential running mate.
Rather than suddenly reversing his position, Gingrich had been thinking for months about Trump’s trade views and why they appeal to working-class voters. He had helped President Clinton win congressional approval of NAFTA in 1993. Today, he told Politico in an email, “we are in a different era.”
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
