Worth clicking over
Sundance:
“…The level of media opposition and snark against President Trump is simply so ridiculous at this point there’s a desperation to it. So let us consider…
From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:
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- The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States. A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
- The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States. A return to economic independence.
- The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products. China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.
Donald Trump was alone on these issues. No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.
Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?
In early 2017 President Trump and his administration coined the phrase: “economic security is national security”, and the economic team set about starting a very complex process to ensure the past three decades of trade policy was reversed.
One month after taking office, February 2017, President Trump met with labor unions and assembled a corporate manufacturing council, telling all of them they needed to change their thinking about manufacturing overseas.
The members of the council didn’t like the conversation; many of them were Wall Street multinationals who were themselves part of the historic shift in moving jobs to Asia and beyond. Several months later the council disbanded amid the policy contention; but Trump persisted with the America First agenda.
President Trump, never wavered; he warned the corporate CEO’s they needed to adjust their thinking and bring back their manufacturing jobs. Trump warned them to reorient their supply chains because they had become too dependent on China; and that dependency was manifesting as geopolitical risk if the U.S. and China were in conflict.
Time after time, conversation after conversation, in the background of events where few media were paying attention, President Trump spoke privately and publicly about the issue of over-reliance on Chinese products and critical goods from southeast Asia.
Then, after months of warnings, came the tariff hammer.
Those same manufacturing council executives and their Wall Street pundits screamed into every microphone they could find that President Trump was going to collapse the economy; that consumer prices would skyrocket; that Steel and Aluminum tariffs would mean everything from beer to soup would no longer be affordable.
Team Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and USTR Robert Lighthizer didn’t waiver. President Trump accepted the criticism of “Tariff-Man”; he owned the downside and then expanded the tariffs even higher upon more goods. The CEO’s shrieked louder, but eventually, reluctantly, some started moving supply chains out of China.
While Team Trump renegotiated trade with South Korea and Japan; and while Trump renegotiated NAFTA with Mexico and Canada; the president kept the pressure on those U.S. corporations and multinationals to return critical manufacturing to the United States.
Now, with the global pandemic known as Coronavirus, people are starting to awaken to the real dangers of our medicines, pharmaceuticals and critical health care products being made overseas. Right now we see the clear reasons why President Trump was so adamant about a conversation no-one wanted, Wall Street hated, and few were paying attention to…”