Populist and pro-labour conservatives need to embrace a harsh truth: so far, the Trump II experiment in reorienting the neoliberal trading order has gone seriously off the rails.
If you had to invent a way to discredit populist reform — to trick Americans into embracing unlimited free trade, dominance by Wall Street and Big Tech, and Chinese control of manufacturing — you couldn’t do a better than President Trump’s recent flip-flops around tariffs. As a bonus, Trump is also fueling a resurgence of free trade among other nations, even those traditionally critical of the trading regime, and encouraging them to align more closely with Beijing.
