Trump is the candidate of the past, not Clinton
In Detroit, the nominee’s overarching narrative was a renewed American dream
Give Donald Trump this: in addressing the Detroit Economic Club Monday he delivered a somewhat cohesive, arguably coherent, speech on the U.S. economy. Resisting the occasional disruption by protestors, only once did the business mogul veer off script, noting that the voices of dissent didn’t quite have the esprit of the Bernie Sanders crowd.
What can we learn from this? One: that Mr. Trump, evidence to the contrary, can be trained. Two: that somewhere in his reportedly disorganized campaign there’s a speech writer adept at scripting lines of American triumphalism. (“We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation.”) Three: that it is not Hillary Clinton who is the candidate of the past, as Trump consistently charges, but Trump himself.
Detroit was a well-chosen locale for a nostalgic trip down memory lane, exposing the soft underbelly of Trump’s economic agenda.
The city’s economic club was founded in 1934 at a time when Alfred P. Sloan was president of General Motors, Canadian Sam McLaughlin sat on the board of directors and operating results commingled U.S. and Canadian car production.
Auto production was at last rebounding from the depths of the Depression and GM reported with some confidence that the worst was behind it, which would turn out to be true. Unit sales were up (a low-end Chevy could be had for $465; a Cadillac topped out at about seven grand). Motor City’s postwar heyday lay ahead.
And so, Trump declared, “The city of Detroit is where our story begins.”
Reclaiming that history is going to be some trick. Yet Trump pledges that his administration would revive the coal industry and the steel industry all at a go, presumably aided and abetted by a loosening of environmental regulations.
“I am going to cut regulations massively. Massively,” he emphasized Monday. (It was George Saunders, writing in The New Yorker, who likened Trump’s emphatic right-handed habit of touching finger to thumb to an eastern mudra. Exactly right.) It is this romanticized reindustrialization that will, in Trump’s mind, provide the foundation for his promised new chapter in American prosperity. “American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities and American ships will control the seas,” he said, invoking a rare poetic cadence. Oh, and American steel will shoot new skyscrapers into the sky all over the country.
In what was surely a Trumpian elaboration on a scripted line, the presidential hopeful announced that he would not only jump start America, but “It can be done and it won’t even be that hard.” Easy. Massively easy. By the end of his speech, his earlier points about tax reform — reducing the number of income tax brackets to three from seven; eliminating the carried interest deduction; across the board income tax reductions — had been subsumed in this overarching narrative of a renewed American dream.
If recent polls prove a trend, with Hillary Clinton pulling comfortably ahead on the broadening belief that Trump is simply not qualified for top office (the letter from 50 Republican security officials asserting that Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history” is especially noteworthy), Trump’s economic fantasies will be moot. In the meantime, his campaign platform should prove useful in getting Clinton herself to tighten up her position on globalization. This has always been slippery ground where Clinton is concerned, going all the way back to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement when her husband was president. Yes, the agreement was not of his design (Clinton said that her husband had “inherited” the deal, which was true) but also true is that Bill Clinton was an ardent promoter of globalization, which exposed its clear negative effects over time. According to The Washington Post, Hillary Clinton said in a 2007 CNN debate that NAFTA had been a mistake “to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.” In 2005, she voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which passed nevertheless. A year ago, she said that trade deals must “produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security.” Her waffling on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement has previously been discussed in this column. On Monday, Trump went full bore at NAFTA. If elected he vowed a renegotiation of the deal. The TPP? “Catastrophic.” Flawed trade deals have allowed for Trump’s romanticized reimagining of an America of long ago. Clinton’s challenge is to retain an internationalist world view while defining how such deals are to be managed going forward. The first presidential debate lies six weeks away. jenwells@thestar.ca