In policy terms, Trump’s victory is especially clear on
his two signature issues, trade and immigration. But what he has accomplished goes beyond any narrow matter of policy. Adopting his approach to those issues involves a change in the way political obligation is understood: it entails a clearer realisation that it is permissible, and often essential, to give priority to one’s fellow citizens over those of other countries.
When Trump descended the golden escalator to announce his first presidential candidacy in 2015, his argument that free trade and mass immigration were hurting the United States was out of step with leading opinion in both political parties and with the academic consensus. But in the nine years since, with the help of these two issues, he has transformed American politics, not only remaking the Republican Party in his image but forcing Democrats to move in his direction as well.
Trump has noted this dynamic. Even as he paints Kamala Harris as a radical, he has joked that she has lately adopted so many of his policies he plans to “send her a MAGA cap”. He could say much the same about the Biden administration, with its continuation of his tariffs on Chinese goods and its recent efforts to project a tougher image on immigration, not least in the bipartisan border Bill.
Even some experts are coming around. During the 2016 presidential campaign, a group of 370 economists, including eight Nobel laureates, signed a letter accusing Trump of ignoring “the benefits of international trade” and of exaggerating the “modest” role that immigration has played in the stagnation of working-class wages.
But in March of this year, one of those economists, the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, offered a much more negative assessment of free trade and immigration. “I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers,” he wrote. “I no longer think so.” He added that he had also become “much more sceptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers” – and even of its role in reducing global poverty.
To be sure, the transformation that Trump has brought about has often been fitful and subject to resistance. Particularly on immigration, Trump’s polarising approach at times drove immigration advocates to an opposite extreme. And important differences remain between the parties. But now, as he completes his third campaign, he can claim a remarkable degree of vindication.
Trump’s views on trade and immigration were set years before he entered politics. “I believe very strongly in tariffs,” he told the journalist Diane Sawyer in 1989. “America is being ripped off.” In his 2000 book The America We Deserve he wrote that “our current laxness toward illegal immigration shows a recklessness and disregard for those who live here legally”.
In that book, Trump also challenged the free-market assumption that “constructive engagement” with China would eventually push the country toward greater economic and political freedom. He argued that presidents from both parties had given China “far too easy a ride”.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s views on trade and immigration put him at odds not only with Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden but also with much of the Republican establishment. Though both parties had a record of objecting to unfair trade practices and enforcing border laws, these measures were often seen as mere stopgaps on the way to a world where people and goods moved more freely. In 2013, Clinton, who that same year supported a Senate immigration bill that would fund an enhanced border-security plan, told a group of bankers that her “dream” was “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”.
After assuming the presidency in 2017, Trump directly challenged this view. He renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement; withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement brokered by Barack Obama; and placed tariffs on about US$360 billion in Chinese goods. He also took more than 400 executive actions aimed at limiting immigration, part of a wide-ranging effort that significantly slowed the growth of the foreign-born population.
Trump’s approach to trade had many critics. “Trump doesn’t get the basics,” Biden said in 2019. “He thinks his tariffs are being paid by China. Any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying.”
And much of the public recoiled from Trump’s approach to the border, especially his family-separation policy. Democrats not only rejected his most controversial measures, they also embraced ideas that once might have seemed outside the mainstream. Harris denounced Trump’s border wall as “un-American,” endorsed decriminalising border crossings and supported government health care for undocumented migrants.
But in the nearly four years since Biden entered office, much has changed. Democratic opposition to Trump on trade and immigration has wavered and at times reversed itself.
Start with trade policy. Rather than undo Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, Biden kept them in place. A review of the tariffs published in September by the Biden administration concluded that they had been effective in countering China’s hostile trade practices and had reduced US reliance on Chinese imports and should be maintained. Biden has even decided to increase tariffs on about $18 billion in Chinese imports.
An embrace of tariffs is likely to continue if Harris is elected president. Though she has campaigned against Trump’s proposal to impose an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20%, she is not seen by free-trade advocates as a consistent ally. In a recent poll, 56% of respondents said they would be more likely to back a candidate who supported a 10% tariff on all imports. Domestic politics and geopolitical competition suggest that tariffs are here to stay.
One sign of Trump’s triumph is the eagerness of swing-state Democrats to invoke his name on trade. Last month, an ad for Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania brags that he “sided with Trump to end Nafta and put tariffs on China to stop them from cheating”. Another advertisement last month, for Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, declares that she “got President Trump to sign her Made in America bill,” which strengthens requirements for federally funded projects to use domestically produced materials.
Another significant indication of Trump’s success in changing the conversation on trade was a speech last year by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, delivered at the Brookings Institution. In the speech, he declared the arrival of a “new Washington consensus” that rejects free trade as an end in itself, defended tariff policies and observed that “economic integration didn’t stop China from expanding its military ambitions”.
Trump can also claim some measure of victory on immigration. As of July, 55% of Americans want immigration to decrease, the highest percentage since 2001. Over the past year, the percentage of Democrats who want to see immigration decrease has risen by 10 points. A striking 42% of Democrats say they would support “mass deportations of undocumented immigrants”.
In the current campaign, Harris has taken a much more restrictive view on immigration than she did several years ago. She has promised to sign the bipartisan border bill, which mandates spending hundreds of millions to extend the wall that she once called un-American. She not only opposes decriminalising border crossings but has also promised to pursue “more severe criminal charges” against repeat offenders.
Old-line Democrats and new-wave progressives are associating themselves with Trump’s border policies. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio has aired an ad boasting that he “wrote a bill that Donald Trump signed to crack down on drugs at the border”. Dan Osborn, a labour-backed independent candidate challenging one of Nebraska’s Republican senators, has said that “if Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy”.
To be sure, it is possible to exaggerate the agreement underlying this new consensus. The Biden administration frames its trade and industrial policy in terms of a transition to renewable energy sources, an enthusiasm that Trump does not share. Biden has also taken a softer line with Europe, rolling back Trump-era tariffs on European aluminium and steel. And though Democrats have adopted tougher border rhetoric and policies, their approach still contrasts with that of Trump, who has proposed mass deportations.
In retrospect, the Biden years may be seen as an attempt to accept and extend elements of Trump’s critique of US trade policy, while conceding less to him on immigration. But Democrats’ recent change in tone suggests that this strategy has failed, and they may continue to move closer to Trump’s restrictive border policies. If that occurs, it will be a sign of a more profound transformation.
Underlying our debates over immigration and trade is something deeper than any analysis of economic benefits. As Deaton, the economist, put it, his change of mind on these issues was accompanied by a realisation that “we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others”. One can agree with this statement without supporting any of the policy proposals of Trump, or feeling any attraction to his personality. (Deaton, for his part, has endorsed Harris.) But if Trump has forged a new consensus, it is because he forced people to confront this truth.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Matthew Schmitz
Photographs by: Doug Mills
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
