Which is the real Trump?

Ijust returned from a two-week speaking tour of Asia. I spoke in front of hundreds of people in five countries about “The Trump Phenomenon” and what his election will mean for the world economy.

First, I must comment on the people of Asia. I met wonderful people. I was welcomed with open arms and treated like friends and family. This trip was one of the finest experiences of my life. Many of my new friends are already making plans to visit me in Las Vegas.

This trip was proof positive that people all over the world want the same things as Americans — economic freedom, opportunity, mobility and prosperity. People all over the world crave lower taxes, less welfare and smaller government.

What I learned is that the world does not hate Donald Trump. The people I met in Asia love Trump. They love America. They want Trump to succeed. They think he’s a breath of fresh air.

Here comes the important part. Even Asians thousands of miles away agree with President Trump on key issues. And they are turned off by the Democrats.

The audiences for my speeches throughout Asia were about 90 percent Chinese and 10 percent Muslim. After my speeches, I spoke to many of the Muslims in attendance to ask about their views of Trump. All were (not surprisingly) negative about Trump’s so-called “Muslim travel ban.” I understand their concerns.

Yet even Muslims in far-away foreign lands think Democrats are wrong on immigration. Every Muslim I spoke to thought it was bizarre that Democrats in America oppose building the wall, deportations or stronger immigration laws.

Muslim business leaders said things to me like, “How can anyone disagree with a wall to secure your border? It’s your country. You decide who comes in. Every country decides who comes in.” I also heard, “How can Democrats oppose deportations of illegal aliens? They came into your country illegally? Why would they get to stay?”

Yes, Muslims want the right to legally immigrate or travel in the United States. But they all — to a man and woman — understood that America has every right to secure her borders, limit who comes in and kick out anyone here illegally.

They all agreed they want the exact same laws in place to protect their own countries. No one

wants millions of foreigners to illegally flood their country, then demand welfare, food stamps, free health care and free education. None of the Asians or Muslims I met would dare support or defend those things.

Yet Democrats in America do. Even Muslims outside America think Democrats are nuts.

Finally, here is how foreigners see the Democrat Party. I met a 75-year old Chinese business owner who laughed out loud at the Democrat response to Trump’s speech to Congress last week. He called the former Kentucky governor who was chosen to give the response old, lifeless, boring. He remarked “Was he alive? He seemed dead to me. Are you sure he had a pulse?”

When 75-year old Chinese men from Hong Kong laugh at the guy Democrats chose to reply to President Trump, you know Democrats are in big trouble.

I also sat with a group of Chinese businessmen in Hong Kong watching the speech. All of them were shocked that many Democrats in Congress didn’t stand or clap when the wife of a Navy SEAL killed in action was honored. They found this disgusting and disgraceful.

Given what I saw and heard in five Asian countries, President Trump is on the right track. And the Democrat Party is in big trouble.

Will anyone develop a coherent ideological alternative to Trumpism? If early signs are any reliable indication, it won’t be the Democrats.

That’s the takeaway from the evidence of how the minority party in Congress responded to President Trump’s speech to a joint session.

The two most troubling elements of Democratic response came in the China-trade-bashing and the Wall Street-bashing.

The China-bashing came in a tweet issued by the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez. Perez, who had been labor secretary in the Obama administration. He mocked Trump’s “buy American” idea by posting a photograph of a “Donald J. Trump signature collection” brand silk necktie with a “made in China” tag.

It wasn’t clear whether Perez was attacking Trump for his hypocrisy, or for sending jobs overseas by allowing a license holder to purchase Chinese-made silk or neckties manufactured abroad.

Either way, what Perez wasn’t doing was explaining that the Chinese have been cultivating silkworms for 5,000 years, while the American silk business has never amounted to much. If Perez wants to start raising silkworms in his backyard or invest in some American company that thinks it can do that better than the Chinese can, good luck to him. Until then, silk seems a classic example of what economists call comparative advantage — the idea that Americans are better off buying silk from China and focusing instead on other industries where we can do things better than the Chinese.

Thinking of the Chinese-made necktie as a loss to the American economy is an error of zero-sum thinking. In fact the voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial. Americans benefit from buying the ties, and the Chinese benefit from selling them.

President Reagan articulated this crisply back in 1986, when he cited David Ricardo, a British economist who lived from 1772 to 1823. “He held, simply, that if each nation concentrated on the production of the articles that it could produce most efficiently, then traded those with other nations to obtain the articles it needed, not some but all nations would be likely to see their living standards rise,” Reagan said. “Ricardo was right, that vigorous world trade leads to higher standards of living for all.”

The Wall Street bashing came most crassly in a tweet from a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, Stephen Lynch, who said, “The Trump White House needs a Goldman Sachs hiring freeze.”

It was also evident from the Senate Democratic leader, Charles Schumer. Schumer retweeted a line from the former governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear, who gave the Democrats’ televised response to Trump’s speech: “Trump picked a cabinet of billionaires and Wall Street insiders. … That’s not being our champion, that’s being Wall Street’s champion.”

Schumer represents New York and fundraises extensively from its financial industry. Alas, it’s probably asking too much for him to defend that industry’s value in public. As for Goldman Sachs, it was only a few months ago that Democrats were bashing Trump for the supposed anti-Semitic theme of a campaign video that featured an image of Goldman’s CEO. Trump accused Hillary Clinton of being “totally owned by Wall Street.”

Maybe the Democrats think running against Wall Street and China trade worked so well politically for Trump in the 2016 campaign that it’s worth copying. That gets the politics and the substance wrong. The country would be better off if, on these topics, the Democrats — or at least some political movement — followed the advice conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly offered in her 1964 book: “A Choice Not An Echo.”