Trump’s tariff obsession came up in conversation this morning and I realized that many people may not have seen this great documentary about Trump and trade. If you’re curious about why he is so stuck on it, this explains it:
As FRONTLINE and NPR explore in the new documentary Trump’s Trade War, Trump has taken an aggressive stance on trade for decades. He has pushed a tariff strategy since he first toyed with the idea of running for president in the late 1980s — a message that bore notable similarities to the one that helped propel his 2016 campaign.
As the film recounts, Trump’s ire was then directed at Japan’s trade practices.
“The fact is, you don’t have free trade. We think of it as free trade, but you right now don’t have free trade,” Trump said in a 1987 episode of Larry King Live that’s excerpted in Trump’s Trade War. “A lot of people are tired of watching the other countries ripping off the United States. This is a great country.” He shared similar sentiments in an interview with Oprah.
“He believed from the beginning that there’s really nothing worse than being laughed at,” Marc Fisher, author of Trump Revealed, tells FRONTLINE and NPR in the above scene from the documentary. “And he came to see the Japanese as laughing at the United States and taking advantage of the United States by stealing the jobs, by dumping product here.”
After the Japanese economy cratered, though, Trump would shift his focus to a rising economic power: China. The first time former advisor Steve Bannon came face to face with Trump, a significant amount of their meeting was spent discussing China, Bannon says in the film.
“He’s been a guy that’s watched Lou Dobbs for 30 or 40 years,” Bannon says, referring to the TV commentator who has long criticized free trade and globalization. “And the only thing he had formed as a world view was China.”
He watched Lou Dobbs and saw ships unloading Japanese cars and that was that.
That’s the Great Billionaire Businessman who knows more about the economy than anyone in the history of America.
You know he’s actually an imbecile and I know he’s actually an imbecile but a whole lot of people in this country are deluded that his gibberish is some kind of genius. Go figure.