Trading places

Into D.C. parachuted President Trump in 2017, promising a bold new approach to trade that would finally put America first. Out of the 12-nation, exhaustively negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership he yanked the United States, vilifying the pact as “a rape of our country” and insisting it would benefit U.S. businesses to broker deals with partners one on one.

“We are going to put a lot of people back to work,” he proclaimed as he ripped up the TPP.

Into a trade war with China the President more recently plunged us, hiking tariffs on steel and aluminum on a thin pretext of national security risk, and setting off a retaliatory hike on American goods in one of the largest global markets.

Yet even as the President clings to the mindless mantra that multinational trade deals sell out U.S. industry, politics and economics now send him crawling back to where we began.

When China answered those aluminum and steel tariffs with huge tariffs on farm products like pork, soybeans and corn, growers felt a sting of betrayal. Many of them are — or had been — Trump supporters, left reeling by economic warfare.

The stock market, understandably, reacted with even more panic to the prospect of a protracted trade war.

And so, Trump on Thursday asked his staff to look at reentering talks on that same TPP, backsliding to the negotiating table after the 11 countries we abandoned recrafted the deal on their own terms.

Contrary to Trump’s caricature, the TPP was cannily concocted to create a counterweight to rising Chinese economic influence in the region. Now, with U.S. influence erased from its design, Trump dreams of resetting the terms in our favor. Good luck with that.