Sometimes Issue Aren’t Being Addressed, Then He Messes Them Up
All of us who find Trump to be a catastrophe, and who see him being so thoroughly wrong so often, could easily get in the habit of being completely dismissive of him. That would leave us open to valid criticism.
Trump has a habit of identifying a problem and then making lots of publicity about it for himself. Some of the problems are obvious ones that everyone wants solutions or improvements on. Trump talked a lot about inflation. No surprise. Any candidate would. But others problems were not on the general radar of things leaders in government were looking to address.
One was that our NATO partners should contribute more. That’s true. They’ve often been contributing far below what was agreed upon and far below their supposed target portion their national income. People who deal with NATO issues were aware of this and you could find mentions of it occasionally in wonky commentary, but it was mostly under the radar. Trump made a big deal out of it and the amount of contribution did go up during his first term.
But then there comes the second part of his pattern. Identify a problem, then create damage and chaos while either messing with it or attacking it. On NATO the partners should have been contributing more but the fact that we contribute most is not a problem. It puts us in the driver’s seat and that’s a good thing. He completely missed that point. Plus he talked of wanting to abandon NATO. That’s a terrible idea, but it’s true to his form.
The point is that when we of the opposition are critical we should be careful not to be blanket critical or it leaves us open to, “Well, he was right about NATO. Why didn’t Biden do something about that?” Well, that’s true. Then he proceeded to mess it up.
Here are a couple of others. He was partly right about China. This goes back to his first term in office. China was being abusive of U.S. companies and intellectual property. They would offer cheap production to U.S. companies, then steal the product design and make their own. Or they would require companies to turn over design and company know-how information or refuse to do business. We ignored that much of the time in decades past in order to draw China into the global economy, making war less likely, but it had long gotten past being good policy. Only tepid steps had been taken to change it but Trump got much more aggressive about it. That’s his default mode is to be aggressive about things, and like the broken clock that’s right twice a day…
One more. Reputable economists debate the pluses and minuses of the nature of our trade. It’s a subtle debate, not at all like Trump’s blanket attack on having any trade deficit at all. It’s not just about trade balance but also about the kinds of things we import and export. Here’s one excellent summary. On some products we do leave ourselves vulnerable for making none of it here, like some pharmaceuticals. (Of course the idea was if we kept moving toward a more cooperative and interdependent global economy that wouldn’t be a problem, but when some leaders like Trump steer the world toward greater antagonism it creates problems.) It may be that the nature of our international trade has us in a less than optimal state. If so it needs smart and careful adjustment of policies. But walking into the china shop swinging a baseball bat? As Trump has with tariffs? Not a solution.
Trump is wrong on plenty enough to deserve endless criticism. Just remain aware that he is not absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, and you’ll stay on solid ground.
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