The obituaries are pouring in, and the body isn’t even cold yet. The GOP, once the nation’s unabashedly pro-trade party, is waving the white flag of surrender. For the moment, the country’s pro-trade voters are politically homeless. America now has two protectionist parties. At least, this is the prevailing narrative. While it is surely the case that Donald Trump is responding to what he believes are incentives to sound as anti-trade as possible, the GOP has not yet given in to the allure of populist trade barriers.
“The elites of the Democratic and Republican parties have had a consensus on so-called free trade,” crowed AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff Thea Lee in an interview with the AP. That report detailed how the once-fringe antipathy toward trade within the Republican Party–exemplified by its populist evangelists like Senator Rick Santorum and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee–has gone mainstream in the form of Donald Trump. The celebrity candidate’s ascension is due, in part, to his opposition to the spread of free trade and he has managed to convert some of his party’s formerly pro-trade activists into skeptics. That’s all true, but is the GOP now an anti-trade party or a pro-Trump party? For the moment, it seems like the latter.
One point in favor of the notion that America is entering a protectionist phase and the GOP is only following its voters’ lead is that Donald Trump likely doesn’t believe a word of his protectionist rhetoric. In August of 2005, Trump penned a passionate defense of “outsourcing jobs.” “We will have to leave borders behind,” wrote the man who would fashion himself as the nation’s preeminent border hawk today, “and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability.”
That was on the eve of Hurricane Katrina. Soon after that, the GOP’s brand became unpopular and so Trump became a Democrat. By 2012, the candidate was again a Republican and fishing for ways to ingratiate himself to the most disaffected faction of GOP voters. “Rick Santorum’s 2014 book Blue Collar Conservatives pointed Trump to a segment of the electorate that was ripe for seduction,” wrote Virginia Hume in a piece for The Weekly Standard. “Trump studied the book and even had the author to Trump Tower to discuss it.” Thus, Trump the populist rose from the ashes of Trump the internationalist.
The uncharitable interpretation for the GOP’s professional political class here is that Trump sensed that the party’s mood was turning away from free trade before its representatives in public office. There is, however, a difference between being out of touch and simply declining to follow the ill-conceived passions of the mob. For the moment, those members of the Republican Party in positions of authority don’t seem nearly as anti-trade, despite the apparent short-term upsides to adopting Trump’s protectionist rhetoric even disingenuously.
This week, a number of ranking House Republicans insisted that they would seek “a modern, new trade agreement” with the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote. Such a move would help create a soft landing for Great Britain when it exits the EU and stands in contrast to President Barack Obama’s desire to see devolution be a slow and, arguably, painful process for the UK. That should be fine with the pro-Brexit community in London which, contrary to popular reporting, was never isolationist or protectionist. Quite the opposite; it’s members advocated greater integration with the truly free economies of the Anglosphere and the former British Commonwealth rather than with the languid, bureaucratized economies of the continent.
This seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that support for trade is anathema in the present populist climate. But just as the journalistic class uniformly appeared to see Brexit as a financial calamity brought about by lunatics, the conventional wisdom on trade appears to be heavily influenced by the journalistic community’s liberal preconceptions. If Trump is successful in dragging the GOP toward protectionism, they will only be doing their best impression of progressive Democrats
You rarely hear a Democratic candidate in a competitive Senate race facing an incumbent GOP officeholder say a nice word about the opposition party’s presidential nominee. 2016 is an odd year. On Thursday, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate Katie McGinty urged Senator Pat Toomey to follow Trump’s lead and oppose “China-friendly policies” like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which, it must be said, is specifically designed to economically isolate China). Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ chief concession from Democrats following his surprisingly strong performance in the primaries was to stock the party’s platform committee with his far-left allies. So far, they have devoted much of their efforts to scuttling the TPP and consecrating trade protectionism as one of the party’s chief values.
Beyond Trump, who has taken to inadvisably equating the TPP with “rape,” attacks on what the fringe right dubbed “Obama-trade” are anathema to the GOP in Congress. 49 of 54 GOP senators and 190 of 246 House Republicans voted in favor of “trade promotional authority” for Barack Obama last year. “A Republican President will complete negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership to open rapidly developing Asian markets to U.S. products,” read the party’s 2012 platform. RNC officials might be twisting themselves into knots to avoid contradicting their mercurial standard-bearer, but this remains a pro-trade party. And what happens in the likely event that Donald Trump loses in November? Will the GOP keep the torch lit for Trump or do whatever they can to wipe the slate clean?
Donald Trump has done his best to remake the GOP into a progressive, pro-choice, protectionist party, but that transformation has encountered a natural resistance among its elected members. It’s reasonable to expect that resistance to continue right up into the autumn. Whatever happens after that is up to the voters.
