Mr. Trump comes to Toledo
ITOLEDO, Ohio hope someone briefs Republican nominee Donald Trump about the people of Toledo before he speaks here tonight: We are a compassionate city of neighbors. A city of laborers and skilled workers. A city of immigrants. And a city devastated by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In one sense, I believe Mr. Trump has already won, no matter who is elected president in November. Mr. Trump has made it the issue of this campaign: So-called “free trade,” and its consequence: de-industrialization. Hillary and Bill Clinton, principal cheerleaders for NAFTA, have had to amend their views.
Canadian businessman and author Conrad Black, in a recent oped in the Canadian newspaper National Post, admonished the American media: “Stop wringing your hands” about Donald Trump and report on what the man is saying and the people he is talking to, and for. In some ways the message can be summarized in one word: “Jobs.” And the constituency in another: the “underemployed.”
Any campaign can be a series of distractions and every candidate has his demons, which lead to more distractions. I hope Mr. Trump forgets about Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich and keeps his focus on jobs and the forgotten Americans who put their hope in him.
The Toledo Blade has just published a series on the forgotten Ohio — the Ohio bypassed by Mr. Kasich’s “Ohio miracle.” The series focused on the loss of factories and factory jobs in midsize and smaller Ohio towns — like Coshocton, Fremont, and Marietta. The result? Devastation. Prosperous middle-class towns that became poor Appalachian towns — now near-hopeless stage sets and pseudo-ghost towns.
I hope Mr. Trump goes to central city Youngstown one day soon. But I also hope he goes to Coshocton.
The Trump campaign is a movement, as the Obama campaign was in 2008. It’s about the dispossessed. Liberals don’t get that. It’s not their dispossessed. The media doesn’t get it. But a lot of Ohioans do, because they, or their families, have been, over the last 30 years, left economically forsaken.
Those small towns are now filled with Trump voters who see, correctly, what has been a bipartisan fiasco: the housing bubble and Wall Street crash, 10 years of aimless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East, a foreign policy that ricochets from trigger happy to paralysis, with no clear goals (yet it asks young Americans kids who need a way to pay for college to risk their lives for it). And now we have police being assassinated in multiples and homegrown jihadists committing mass murder.
Are the nation’s wheels falling off? No, but we sure do have a problem.
Many of us in media have decried Mr. Trump’s bluntness, sometimes harshness and occasional crudeness. But the flip side is a directness that has tapped something deep in the American political psyche: No more political correctness, the candidate says. We haven’t got time for it. Just state the obvious common-sense truths.
But, I return to Mr. Black’s point: How about some reporting? How about we look past personality and tone to what Mr. Trump is saying? Mr. Black has argued that Donald Trump’s strength is that he is not ideological. He is an independent thinker and a problem solver — “he is moderate in all things except illegal and hostile immigration and unequal trade.”
Unequal trade — NAFTA — nearly destroyed this community. So we do not feel moderately about trade in Toledo. And, presently, more “globalization” is coming in the form of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, another bipartisan mugging of cities like this one. How’d that work out for us last time?
As Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel has said, the “stupid culture wars” have distracted us from our structural economic malaise and our unilateral economic disarmament. As Mr. Thiel put it: “Instead of going to Mars we have invaded the Middle East.” Who cares which bathroom people use, Mr. Thiel, a gay man, asked at the GOP convention: We need engineers, factories, fighter jets that fly and a military with modern computer technology. He said he’s for Mr. Trump not because he’s a hater but because he is a builder. Let’s see if the builder speaks in Toledo tonight.
Keith C. Burris is the editorial page editor of The Toledo Blade (kburris@theblade.com, 419-724-6266).