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. . . Mr. Trump is bringing mercantilism back. The New York billionaire is challenging the last 200 years of economic orthodoxy that trade among nations is good, and that more is better.
He is well on his way to becoming the first Republican nominee in nearly a century who has called for higher tariffs, or import taxes, as a broad defense against low-cost imports. And there is a good chance he would face a Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who has expressed fewer reservations about trade, inverting a longstanding political dynamic.
Among Republican standard-bearers, “There’s nobody since Hoover who talked this way about trade,” said I. M. Destler, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland and the author of “American Trade Politics,” a history. For most of the last century, Mr. Destler said, such skepticism about trade had been relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party.Continue reading the main story
Mr. Trump’s mercantilism is among his oldest and steadiest public positions. Since at least the 1980s, he has described trade as a zero-sum game in which countries lose by paying for imports. The trade deficit with China, which reached $366 billion last year, makes America the biggest loser. “Our trade deficit with China is like having a business that continues to lose money every single year,” Mr. Trump told The Daily News in August. “Who would do business like that?”
