Don’t count Trump out
For Joe Biden, it has been a good week.
The U.S. presidential contender is leading his rival, Donald Trump, handily in the polls.
Biden’s announcement Tuesday that he has chosen California Sen. Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate has added a soupçon of energy to his unusually low-key campaign.
All of this is good news for those Americans (and Canadians) who hope to see the end of Trump.
But the presidential race is far from over. And Trump, in spite of his obvious faults, is still able to define many of the issues of the campaign.
In particular, he has forced free-trader Biden to compete on the field of economic nationalism, which is Trump territory. Biden’s slogan, “Build Back Better,” is clumsier than Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” But it is Trumpian in its intent. As Biden explained last month, he would reduce America’s reliance on foreign goods by encouraging domestic manufacturing.
Like Trump, he would support a vigorous Buy America policy. “When the federal government spends taxpayers’ money we should use it to buy American products and support American jobs,” Biden said.
He said that if elected president in November, he would direct an additional $400 billion in government spending toward U.S. manufactured products.
This month, Ottawa reacted furiously when Trump used his national security powers to levy tariffs on Canadian aluminum.
But Biden very carefully said nothing. He didn’t say that Trump’s action violated the spirit of the new NAFTA just signed by Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
Nor did he say the president overreached himself by treating aluminum imports from long-time ally Canada as an issue of national security.
Instead, he kept his mouth shut. Economic nationalism may not have much support among academic economists. But it resonates with American voters.
Trump understood this early on. Economic nationalism has been one of the few areas in which the U.S. president has been relatively consistent.
I think Biden gets it too. But the former vice-president has a record as a free trader that in this protectionist era does him little political good.
The other weapon Trump has in his arsenal is the power of the presidency. He used that power last week when, in an effort to circumvent a Congressional impasse, he signed an executive order that would allow a just-expired increase in jobless benefits to at least partially continue.
The order was clumsily done. And according to some legal experts, it exceeded the president’s constitutional authority.
But politically, it made the point: Americans out of work because of the pandemic might not be able to count on a Congress made dysfunctional by hyper-partisanship. But they could count on Trump.
True, at $300 a week, the Trump increase in jobless benefits was half of the now-expired program it replaced. But it was better than nothing, which was the alternative on offer. Other executive orders signed by Trump at the same time suspended some student loan payments and protected some tenants from eviction. Again, good politics.
Less adroit was the executive order allowing employers to defer payroll taxes. That left Trump open to charges that he is attempting to gut social security, the old age pension that is funded by payroll taxes.
All in all, though, don’t count Trump out. If the presidential election is a referendum on his handling of COVID-19, he will lose. He has done a terrible job.
But if he can pivot to economic nationalism — and if he can present himself as the tribune of the people — then he has a fighting chance.
Incidentally, the latest Nielsen ratings show that Fox News, which acts as Trump’s mouthpiece, outranks every other cable and broadcast television network during prime time. That will help him, too.