Jeff Flake is a principled person, as he is happy to tell you, and in his new book, Conscience of a Conservative, he tells that you more than enough. He is correct on the numerous failings of our current president and the need to resist them, but both on this and in his insistence in maintaining conservative principles, he seems not to notice the now-obvious fact that it is due to the holding of one of those principles — unrestricted free trade, with no conditions whatever — that Trump is in the White House today.

Flake seems not to have read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which said we are becoming two nations, unequal and separate; not to have read Salena Zito, whose reports from the Rust Belt showed its desolation; not to have heard of the books that came out about what became of one-factory towns when those plants had gone under; not to have read or heard about the Wall Street Journal’s report of less than a year ago of the impact of the China trade deal on a furniture-making city in North Carolina, where in the next ten years unemployment would rise from 2 percent in 2000 to above 15 percent in 2010, and manufacturing jobs fall from 79,000 in 2000 to 38,000 in 2014.