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Trump Blinks
Under increasing pressure from the fallout of the trade war with China, it looks like President Trump may be walking back one of his campaign promises:
WASHINGTON—One year after withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Donald Trump has asked his top economic advisers to study the possibility of re-entering the trade pact negotiations.
Trump has deputized Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, and Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, to study the possibility of re-entering the TPP if the terms were favorable, the president told a group of lawmakers on Thursday.
The president’s new openness toward the TPP, which he had said during his campaign was a deal “pushed by special interests who want to rape our country,” comes as he is facing criticism from farmers for his escalating trade battle with China. After Trump took aim at China with new steel and aluminum tariffs, Beijing responded by announcing it would place penalties on a list of agricultural products that would affect swaths of the president’s political base.
As a matter of policy, this is a big win in the column for “Good Trump” — it’s absolutely the right policy move from both an economic or foreign policy perspective. As a political matter, it remains to be seen how his base, vehemently opposed to most trade deals, will take the news that the President is going against them on one of his core campaign promises.
Published in Economics
There you go again …..
“Trump TrueBelievers” and “TrumpSkeptics” are terms that are easy to throw around and mis-characterize. By both “sides”.
As one you would label a “TrueBeliever”, I honestly attribute some of what happens that is good to luck rather than some ingenious 4D chess. I do know that 1) he says lots of stuff that he doesn’t mean (and corrects later as either smarter advisers spin it or it was ‘art of the deal’ strategery); and 2) at its source, he absolutely believes that it is good for America, the greatest country in the world.
And following the first anti-American American President … that is extremely refreshing.
I think to lecture me on this is carrying overzealousness to a fair-thee-well. It is just what I was talking about when I asked the Founders of Ricochet if the Monitors – well meaning folk though they be – are not sometimes too overzealous. I didn’t call Bryan a name. I just said he was spouting nonsense, which he was. He fails to understand my meaning when I try to write carefully about Trump. All he seems to know is pro-Trump and anti-Trump. It is more complicated than that. When I try to point that out, I get lectured by someone who thinks he or she is my parent (when I am probably older than that person).
That’s nonsensical. Why would somebody want to be president of the United States if we’re anti-American?
According to the Washington Post, it is more than 5000 pages long. That’s a lot of reading.
Most of that are tariff schedules which you can skip if you want.
I never understood this particular attack on Obama – having a different vision for what America could be does not mean you hate it, it just means you’re wrong.
No. It means you hate America.
I subscribe to this too, Jamie. To assign the Left’s marlackey to hate is too easy. Sure, what they believe makes no sense. But not everyone on the Left is a Joe Stalin. A lot of good people believe crazy things. We should try and think about a sensible way to react to this silliness, instead of talking about hatred. If nothing else, it will help us develop skills in answering this stuff, before it is too late.
To be clear – there are elements of the left that truly do hate the right, and some have hatred of America. I don’t place Obama in that category.
Most of us here are either “red tribe”, or willing to stand up for the red tribe. Both red and blue tribes seem to agree that the red tribe is characteristically American in a special way. I think a lot of what we tend to perceive as hatred for America is discomfort with the red tribe. By that measure, there are many “America haters” within the blue tribe, but how much of this is really hatred of America, as opposed to the narcissism of small differences between two tribes who see each other as the “outgroup”, is unclear.
I do think Obama was fully invested in the idea that race explains everything in America and that the entire culture of America is aligned against African-Americans.
Unfortunately, winning the Presidency did little to disabuse him of that notion even though on its face, it would seem to disprove it.
I don’t agree. I think that’s something ppl on the right projected onto him.
Look, I know this is unpopular to say, but Obama was just a moderate progressive, not some fire breathing radical.
Many conservatives would be shocked to learn that the true left had real problems with what they saw as Obama’s “centrism”.
I’m not convinced. He was a member of the New Party and placed himself well to the left of Bobby Rush in his first campaign.
I think he moderated to win on the national stage, but his core beliefs are very far left.
Well, that may be true, but he sure as hell didn’t govern that way.
He was the most liberal senator. He was good pals with far lefties including well known people like Bill Ayers and more obscure radicals like Robert Creamer. He governed as a far Leftie; the R control of the House from 2011-2017 constrained him a bit. We’re beginning to glimpse his illegal use of the intelligence agencies against his opponents. He tried to overturn all zoning laws (see Westchester Co). He was a member of the socialist new party….
I don’t know, Fred. My jury is still out on that. He was not a fire breather, like, say, Bernie Sanders. But remember when he kept saying “You didn’t build that”? That was right out the Elizabeth Warren playbook. It is pure Egalitarianism. They want to believe that everyone has a hand in building the country. And it never stops.
Sort of like Israel was when it first got started. Her Fathers were all Socialists. That is probably why the Left hates them today: The State turned away from that.
Please permit another “outgroup” perspective to this echo chamber. And yes, I know it is controversial and not in line with the politically correct speech codes of the Left.
Dinesh D’Souza produced a compelling documentary that absolutely documented the hatred of America, and his perception of its “colonialism”, of Barack H. Obama. It is a hatred of America and a twisted version of its history. And something that is commonplace in government schools today because of Leftists throughout academia and the media. And it is rubbish.
That got Mr. D’Souza literally thrown in jail. In America! Our libertarians yawned.
So Mr. D’Souza did what any self respecting, courageous free American would do. He doubled down and produced Hillary’s America.
Each of these documentaries provide absolute proof of the anti-Americanism of not only Barack H. Obama but the entire Democrat party of this decade. Members of the GOP have just been kowtowed into the speech codes imposed upon them from the Left. President Trump and Talk Radio (ooh … mean Rush Limbaugh) refuse to cower to these idiotic speech codes. And so they are labeled by the Left (and Facebook, but I repeat myself) as “Hate Speech”. The really sad part is that so-called right of center “talk blogs” oblige and engage in the exact same speech codes. Sad.
To fundamentally transform it of course. Google Cloward-Piven.
fify.
The answer: because they are interested in “fundamentally transforming the United States of America”
First, congratulations. You got me to put down my phone and use a keyboard to respond to you. I’m going to take this piece by piece.
Okay, I’m sorry, but can we all agree that these designations are mostly bull [expletive]. Congress takes so many votes that depending on what you count and don’t count, you can declare almost anything.
For example, Ben Sasse must love and support Donald Trump. After all, he votes with him 86.6% of the time.
Wow. So they … were friends? That bastard.
I’m friends with all sorts of unsavory people of all political stripes. You could probably prove that I’m a fire breathing Trump supporter that way. After all, I’m part of an online community and used to work for Ricochet. And all you have to do is look at their front page to prove that it’s full of Trump supporters.
You’re right. And when the Democrats controlled Congress for his first two years, he nationalized the American health care sector and set up a single payer system.
No, wait. The complete opposite of that. He imposed an individual mandate, something cooked up by Heritage, and proposed by congressional Republicans in the ’90s, and enacted at the state level by that socialist Mitt Romney.
Right…
First, that’s not a right or left thing, so it has no bearing on my contention that Obama governed as a moderate. Second, that’s not at all proven.
You’re wildly overstating that situation. But nice try.
Yeah. This is nothing.
Yeah, all my lefty colleagues complained to no end about this. (Anecdotal, but my experience was a lot of people on the left thought Obama too far to the center.)
We can’t know why he did what he did but any ideologue would want to be U.S. President but maybe he just wanted to be rich and use benefits, just an aprovechado. Who knows? but to the extent he reflected any consistent ideological bent it reminded me of the anti colonial mind set so perfectly captured in “The Perfect Latin American Idiot”. Anti Americanism is at the center of those folks. I think D’Souza makes the best case out there.
A question for our libertarians: Why do so many prominent libertarians oppose the TPP? Tom Woods and Lew Rockwell oppose it. Many in the Mises school either oppose or are lukewarm. Not long into any debate at CATO and charges of “corporatist”, “mercantilist” and “faux free trade” are flying.
Is it the IP dispute? Or the “perfect enemy of the possible” problem. Or the almost inevitable managed trade that results from these agreements?
It’s a no brainer for me … literally. I don’t exercise the grey cells much. Comparative advantage is a real and powerful good, and any deal which brings more of those advantages into the economy is a plus.
Yet the best arguments I’ve read against TPP are from libertarians opposed to the bureaucratic domination of trade, the corporate control of IP on a global scale and the use of managed trading blocs as foreign policy power plays.
That to me would indicate love, not hate. If you love something, you want to make it better.
But this was just … whatever. What does it even mean? Listen beyond that phrase to the rest of the clip and it’s just empty boiler plate. Like it could be said by a Republican or a Democrat.
D’Souza is a good example of what happens when you start with a premise and then cherry pick evidence to conform with the premise.
I thought it was for a clear violation of campaign finance law.
Moderator Note:
Not HelpingHuh.
That sounds like exactly what you do.I can’t speak to Tom Woods.
Wrt Lew Rockwell, you gotta watch him. He mixes libertarianism with some … not great stuff.
But the trade scholars at Cato had lots of stuff to say about the TPP. You can read some here. This is what Daniel Ikenson had to say:
No. I go the other way.