DEFINE VICTORY
Trump wants a win. But how will he achieve it?
WASHINGTON— Jason Swendt has lasted two decades at the local aluminum smelter, “living the American Dream” on wages good enough to let him adopt a foster child to go with the three kids he already had. But he has been through four layoffs now, seen hundreds of colleagues let go, and he thinks the North American Free Trade Agreement is a big reason why.
Swendt, 45, lives in a small conservative city in the state of Washington, and he voted for Donald Trump in large part because of his tough words about trade. He wants Trump to make this free trade agreement less free, changing it to protect American jobs from cheap Chinese steel rerouted into the U.S. from Mexico.
“We’ve got to do something,” he said. “I don’t know what that is, but we need help from somebody.”
Randy Bradley has lived another version of the dream, working his way up from restaurant dishwasher to restaurant owner. In the 1990s, he opened Burger King franchises in Iowa and Missouri — one of them in 1993, the very year NAFTA was approved by Bill Clinton. They’re both booming.
Bradley, a 63-year-old in a small conservative city in Nebraska, also voted for Trump. But he thinks NAFTA has helped Americans, and Mexicans and Canadians, and he’s skeptical of change.
He worries that altering NAFTA to protect industries like steel — “which doesn’t employ that many people” — will raise prices on a host of manufactured goods, leaving the general public with less cash to do things like eat out.
“The less people have to spend on other things,” he said, “the more they can buy of my food.”
Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., David MacNaughton, said in July that the Canadian government understands that it needs to come to a revised NAFTA that allows Trump to “declare victory” to his voter base.
Talk of Trump’s base inevitably calls to mind the people he emphasized in his campaign rhetoric: antifree-trade workers struggling to eke out a living in a Rust Belt town crippled by factory closures. In fact, it is more diverse.
As negotiations begin on Wednesday in Washington, Trump’s administration is hearing a cacophony of varying and sometimes contradictory demands from big-business groups and Tea Party groups, farmers and ranchers, labourers pining for a return of the industrial economy and entrepreneurs seeking a smoother path to success in a postindustrial world.
On the whole, his voters are opposed to NAFTA by a ratio around two-to-one. But his base is no monolith.
It includes Bruce Reynolds, 67, a former union worker in a now-shuttered auto parts factory, who wants Trump to make “massive changes” to an agreement he believes is responsible for the disappearance of heavy industry in his Indiana city of Muncie. And it includes Brian Billman, 52, owner of a closets business in Duluth, Minn., who wants Trump to make trade with Canada freer, letting him ship his patented product to nearby Thunder Bay, Ont., without so many paperwork hassles. What unites them is faith in Trump. The eight Trump voters who spoke to the Star did not see themselves as experts in the details of NAFTA, and some were wary of Trump’s threat to abandon the agreement entirely if he did not get his way.
But they believed their president, whom they saw as a talented negotiator with their interests at heart, would do the right thing.
“He’s a businessman, and I don’t think he’s going to do something for the special interests,” said Mark Carbone, 48, who employs two Canadians as the chief executive of an 11employee medical-device company in Florida. “I have confidence in him.”
Such sentiments have convinced some trade analysts that Trump might be able to sell virtually any revised NAFTA to Republican voters as a victory, even without the radical overhaul he has promised. The American public is “malleable” on the complex issue of trade and sus- ceptible to the arguments of political leaders, said Alexandra Guisinger, a Temple University professor and author of the book American Opinion on Trade.
Guisinger noted Trump did not appear to lose support when he announced in April that he would be softening his trade pressure on China in order to seek help with North Korea, nor when he agreed in July to drop the idea of implementing a “border adjustment tax” on imports.
“I think at the end of the day, these agreements are complicated enough that politicians can manipulate the story that comes out in a way that voters won’t necessarily react to it,” she said.
But Trump might still face a tough audience in Congress. Revisions to the agreement must be approved by both the House and the Senate. Even if Trump presents the updated version as tougher than the existing version, he will still have to get a majority of legislators to put their names on record in support of NAFTA — an agreement most of them have never been forced to formally endorse.
Trump might well be trying to do it, moreover, during a particularly delicate time: the 2018 congressional pri- mary season, when even Republican legislators with pro-trade beliefs may be nervous about a challenge from an anti-trader. Support for free trade declined among Republican voters during the Barack Obama era, when some party legislators fought him over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it plummeted after Trump rose to the top of the party.
Just 30 per cent of Republican voters now say NAFTA has been good for the country, according to Pew Research, versus 33 per cent who say it has been “very” bad.
“There’s not going to be a Democrat who can vote for this. Even if it’s a good deal, it’s still Trump’s deal. So they’re not going to give him a win. So the wild card is, what’s the Republican Party going to do?” said Dan Ujczo, an Ohio-based trade lawyer specializing in Canada-U.S. issues.
“I think the prevailing wisdom is, ‘Well, Republicans control the House and Senate.’ As we’re seen on health care and everything else, they’re certainly not aligned. And you’re going to have to start counting votes there.”
Trump’s strongest support comes from rural areas. The actual farmers in many of those areas, though, are among the people most worried about the negotiations, fearing a loss of their essential access to Canada and Mexico.
John Linder, 59, is a fifth-generation farmer who farms 1,200 hectares of corn and other crops in an Ohio county that went 72 per cent for Trump. Terminating NAFTA would be “devastating,” he said, and any change that limited continental exchange would hurt.
“The value of trade is very near and dear to my history as a farmer. Canada is so important to us,” he said, and “extremely important to my profitability in Ohio.”
Linder, a member of the National Corn Growers Association board, declined to discuss his vote last year. Like many farmers, though, he was far less enthusiastic about the president’s trade path than many of his neighbours.
“We have who we have,” he said, “and that’s how we work.”