A curious apologia for Trump

The New York Times has a column that is a kind of apologia for Trump - arguing that even if he loses the election, he has already "won", due to Democrats (and even some economists) moving towards the Trumpian line on free trade and tariffs (because Biden kept his Chinese tariffs) and immigration (pushing a tougher line on it.)

I think this is a case of a small element of truth being wildly exaggerated for partisan purposes. 

One thing I still don't understand is how rapidly relations with China went downhill - I'm sure I've said this before, but it seemed that as soon the US decided to go with a nutty populist leader who nonetheless made his admiration for China's authoritarian leader obvious, said Chinese leader decided to hype up Chinese nationalism and aggression.   But (and this is where I could well be wrong*), they seemed to do it at the same time - not in a clear series of escalations that made sense.

I'm not convinced that the benefit of free trade has been shown up as inherently wrong headed in any way, even if clearly leads sometimes to difficult periods of adjustment.   And lifting people out of poverty at the global level is something we should consider "a good thing" - I mean, even the Catholic Church had that attitude to it.

So populist takes against it are always suspect - and Trump's loony idea of (more or less) universal tariffs is so mad it surely has to erase any apologia for him being "ahead of the experts" on the original decision to put tariffs on China.

On immigration I think there is even less reason to argue that Trump has swayed public opinion (even amongst Democrats) towards him.   His entire political career has been built on nasty, racist fear mongering about illegal immigration, a problem that the country has grappled with for decades, and surges in arrivals are often due to factors beyond American's direct control anyway.  The surge in arrivals in recent years would have pushed mainstream America to demanding a better response anyway - it didn't need Trump's Nazi level vilification of arrivals to reach that position.

 

*  Ok, so this Wiki article on the US/China trade war does show it as a series of escalations started by Trump - but at the same time, the Chinese tariffs on Australia in the same period seemed over the top aggressive.  It just seemed that China started to decide to punish anyone who criticised them with trade retaliation.  And the renewed Chinese aggressive stance to re-taking Taiwan was taking place at the same time.