With precious little attention, the Republican Party’s attitude toward international trade has officially shifted. Gone is the 2012 platform’s strong endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and trade in general. Instead, the new platform reflects Donald Trump’s more skeptical attitude toward trade deals (Trump has referred to the TPP as a “rape of our country”). “I expected it to be contentious, and it wasn’t,” said a co-chair of the platform subcommittee on the economy. “People all seemed to be going toward the same goal here, which is to get the candidate elected.”
A minor thing. Unless you are actually an economic conservative who cares anything about jobs and economic growth. A commitment to free trade is not an extraneous add-on to conservative economics; it is the application of conservative economics on a global scale. What Trump has proposed, according to GOP strategist Vin Weber, is “to reverse a Republican stance taken since World War II and embrace the notion of a state-planned economy.” In threatening a 35 percent tariff on many goods imported from Mexico and a 45 percent tariff on imports from China — and by pledging to punish specific U.S. businesses for behavior he doesn’t approve of — Trump is attempting to assume Hugo Chávez-like powers over global commerce.
