It’s been exactly one year since Donald Trump convulsed America’s political pros and punditocracy in howls of hilarity when his rambling campaign kickoff speech veered into his now-famous vow to build his Trump wall across our southern border — and somehow make Mexico pay for it.
Now this: In a rare, carefully scripted speech on Tuesday, Trump delivered a series of political hits that, come November, may turn out to be powerful enough to topple yet another iconic political wall — this one seemingly far more impenetrable than any wall the aspiring mogul-in-chief dreams of being able to build.
Namely: Trump may have found the secret that could topple the solidly Democratic so-called “blue wall” of 18 Northeastern, Midwest industrial, and West Coast states that have been giving Democrats their huge base of presidential Electoral College votes for almost a quarter-century. The “blue wall,” presciently named by Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic, encompasses the states that have voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992.
Standing before a blue-collar audience at a steel mill near Pittsburgh, Trump vowed to not only fight to make things better for blue-collar workers — but made it clear he will do so by shattering to smithereens the U.S. Chamber of Commerce free trade policy pedestal that has been the pet perch of the elephantine Grand Old Party ever since World War II.
Trump launched into the sort of boldly aggressive populist agenda that, if you just read his words, might have left you thinking they’d been spoken by, say, Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. Trump said he will:
• Scrap the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement “to get a better deal, by a lot, not just a little, for our workers.”
• Instruct his commerce secretary to identify “every violation of trade agreements a foreign country is currently using to harm you, the American worker.” And he said, “I’m going to instruct my treasury secretary to label China a currency manipulator, which should have been done years ago!”
Trump rejected the view that, in the global economy, nations benefit by importing goods. He said globalization benefits “the financial elite … (but leaves) millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” He also vowed to fight “a leadership class that worships globalism.”
In short, he opposed the policies long promoted by Republican leaders and their campaign funders, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Chamber took to Twitter to attack Trump for pushing policies that would harm the economy, messaging: “Even under best-case scenario, Trump’s tariffs would strip us of at least 3.5 million jobs.”
In his year of campaigning, Trump has confounded the sort of conventional wisdom that pols and pundits have traditionally carried with them from convention to convention. But then there is the side of him that knows how to reach those ordinary citizens who are most fed up, mad as hell at an established elite who seem out to get them — and just aren’t going to take it anymore.
Martin Schram, an opinion columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. E-mail: martin.schram@gmail.com.
