During last night’s Republican presidential debate, the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker attempted the impossible: He tried to pin Donald Trump down on policy specifics. In this case, it was about trade policy, a subject about which Trump evidently knows very little.
Baker asked the billionaire “which particular parts” of the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal he objected to. If he were familiar with the deal, Trump could have raised any of several issues. Instead, he continued with the same word salad about China that he has been issuing forth since long before the TPP had been negotiated and published.
“If you look at how China and India and almost everyone takes advantage of the Untied States — China in particular, because they are so good, it’s the number one abuser of this country. If you look at the way they take advantage, it’s through currency manipulation. It’s not even discussed in the almost 6,000 page agreement….If [TPP] is approved, it will just be more bad trade deals, more loss of jobs for our country. We are losing jobs like no one’s ever lost jobs before. I want to bring jobs back into this country.”
It took a clear-headed Rand Paul to bring some reality back into the conversation.
“Hey, Gerard?” Paul interjected. “We might want to point out that China’s not part of this deal.” The crowed roared with laughter as Trump shrunk before their eyes. (Never mind the fact that Trump had just accused India of currency manipulation — perhaps making him the first person to do so at least in the last decade.)
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What was clear from this exchange was that Trump knows nothing about this trade agreement, aside from the fact that he’s supposed to be courting a voter base that strongly opposes it.
If the moderators had been less averse to asking “gotcha” questions, they might have quizzed him to name as many countries as he could that are party to the TPP. It probably would not have ended well for him.
On trade, Trump avoids specifics. When he discusses it, he starts talking about how the U.S. has trade deficits with some countries, especially China. (Trade deficits are not inherently bad, by the way, but they are often cited to make free trade sound bad to the uninformed.) He then launches into a standard spiel about currency manipulation. These are just convenient rhetorical vehicles for avoiding a serious discussion of the topic — the politician’s equivalent of what you said in class when you hadn’t read your assignment the night before.
Hillary Clinton was actually correct back when she described the TPP as her most important diplomatic achievement — that is, before she decided to come out against it for self-serving political reasons. At a moment when most of the world is in chaos, TPP would establish an American-led pact of mutual economic self-interest among several of the world’s wealthiest and most dynamic economies, in the one area of the globe where things are relatively quiet and calm. It would also make several Asian and Latin Americans more open to American exports than they are now.
Most importantly, if the U.S. fails to make some kind of agreement like the TPP, China will move into the same zone and dictate trade on its own terms instead. This would be a true disaster for U.S. diplomacy. It would signify that the U.S. has lost influence and prestige in every corner of the world under Obama, instead of just in most of the world.
Republicans should not discourage President Obama from leaving at least one positive accomplishment behind from his presidency in the form of the TPP. And they certainly should not — against the nearly unanimous consensus of economists — indulge the protectionist ignorance that Trump is trying to bring into the GOP mainstream.
