Might Trump Actually Win in November?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
On June 28 the Washington Post, a newspaper that reviles Donald Trump and is a mouthpiece for the American political establishment, ran an interesting opinion piece by Jim Ruth, a retired financial planner.

In his article “I Hate Donald Trump. But He Might Get My Vote,” Ruth asked readers not to stereotype him and others who might vote for Trump.

“We’re not uneducated, uninformed, unemployed or low-income zealots. We’re affluent, well-educated, gainfully employed and successfully retired. Some of us even own our own business, or did before we retired. While we’re fiscally conservative, we’re not tea partyers. And on certain social issues, many of us even have some leftward leanings.”

So why would they consider voting for Trump? Because, writes Ruth, the election of “a wealthy, entitled progressive” is “even more dangerous to the survival of this country than Trump is.” 

Millions of people have lost faith in the American economic bargain as living standards have declined. Their pain has been mostly ignored by an upper middle class intellectual and cultural establishment and they are angry.

Trump has vowed to cancel international trade deals and start an unrelenting offensive against Chinese economic practices, which he considers unfair to the American worker. “They get the expansion. We get the joblessness,” Trump remarked.

An article in the January 2016 Journal of Labor Economics, “Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s,” estimates that rising imports, especially from China, reduced U.S. manufacturing employment by around one million between 1999 and 2011.

Trump said he’d spent years complaining about trade with China. “Nobody listened. But they’re listening now.”

Framing his contest with Hillary Clinton as a choice between hard-edge nationalism and the policies of “a leadership class that worships globalism,” he argues that globalization has helped “the financial elite,” while leaving “millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.”

Trump has attacked Clinton’s past support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade pact negotiated by twelve Pacific Rim countries, including Canada and the U.S., signed in February in Auckland, New Zealand. He warned that the TPP was a “rape of our country” and “the death blow” for manufacturing in this country.

Trump noted that Clinton had backed free-trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the past, which he called a “catastrophe.” In a June 28 address in Pittsburgh titled, “Declaring American Economic Independence,” he promised that he would invoke the agreement’s Article 2205, which allows a party to withdraw on six months’ notice, to pull the United States out of NAFTA if Mexico and Canada did not agree to renegotiate it.

Describing Clinton as a venal tool of the establishment, Trump added that “She gets rich making you poor.”

Trump’s politics may alienate conventional Republicans but it resonates with the white working class.

In June, the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution released the results of an annual survey that included questions on trade. A slight majority of Americans said that free trade agreements were harmful because they send jobs overseas and drive down wages.

Is it possible Trump is riding a political wave that may propel him to the White House? It would be an uphill battle but not out of the question.