When he was President, Trump scrapped our free-trade agreement with our two biggest trading partners with no plan; backed out of a Pacific rim trade plan designed to exclude and balance China; damaged our relations with the EU; and launched an incoherent trade war with China with no declared goals.
For context, Yglesias has written detailed threads and articles on his blog about how devastating Trump's proposed economic platform would be to the economy, inflation, and the deficit. This is the response from an NYT economics reporter.
And there's the longer-term outlook (it would help the economy if we restrain climate change, and don't just mindlessly drill oil and mine coal) and Trump setting on fire the US's global role as a destination for international students, who either return home knowing the US or stay here and build.
I just remember the soybean market going crazy because trump decided to do a trade war. But it was actually really bad, even if nyt economics reporters are goldfish brains.
The series of events there was typically Trump:
1) Trump declares trade war on China. No declared goals, no international cooperation (and he'd killed the TPP)
2) China responds with its own trade war moves. Disaster for American farmers, who export to China. Soy farmers a notable part of this.
3) China makes long-term, meaningful moves to diversify its food imports. This includes for example clearcutting in the Amazon basin (under Bolsonaro, who likes that) to grow soy.
4) Trump's trade war with China collapses, is basically canceled. Never had a stated goal, never achieved a thing.
5) American farmers who lost a lot of money because couldn't sell to China get one-off payments to help compensate for this. But China has moved to diversify its overseas agricultural producers, so these one-time payments aren't really a good response.
The fact that new NAFTA has labor standards because the president was a moron so random Dems got to insert shit with no pushback is something that makes me laugh or drives me to drink depending on the day.
