Trump, trade, and contract

Keeping promises and protecting jobs should reduce cynicism

President Donald Trump has completed his remake of the NAFTA treaty, embracing a new and fairer deal for the United States with Mexico and Canada.

It is called the USMCA — the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. The U.S. comes first and NAFTA is gone.

No matter what one thinks of Mr. Trump personally, no matter what one thinks of his style, and no matter how one voted in the last election, this much has to be said: His presidency is based on keeping his promises.

This is not the way politics and presidencies normally proceed.

Normally, presidents campaign in poetry and govern in prose, in the late Mario Cuomo’s construction. And often that means a president runs on certain ideals and promises and begins trimming those promises on Day 1 in office. An example would be Barack Obama’s promise to close the prison camp largely used for jailing enemy combatants in Guantanamo, Cuba.

This trimming of the sails for “real politics” happens on all levels of politics.

Mr. Trump’s is a different approach: Promise relatively little but then actually do it.

He promised an “America first” foreign policy, which he has begun to elaborate and define more fully, particularly with his recent United Nations speech.

He promised to unleash the economy with deregulation, which he has done.

He promised to appoint originalist judges, which he has also done.

He promised to increase defense spending, which he has done.

And most of all — the centerpiece of his campaign and of his politics — he promised fair trade, managed trade, protection of American industry, and a renegotiation of NAFTA. Now he has done this, too.

In short, Mr. Trump engaged in a contract, which is not a bad way to think of leadership and followership in a democracy.

The voters gave him a four-year commitment to accomplish his goals, which ought not to be abridged lightly.

Beyond showing good faith and a kind of patriotism — it was high time for someone to better protect intellectual property generated in this country, which the new agreement does — is the new NAFTA deal good economics?

Many experts said simply reopening the treaty would be a disaster.

Someone forgot to tell Wall Street and the American consumer.

Many experts now say the prices of cars will go up. Yes but not, perhaps, the prices of cars with high domestic content. And this will, in time, increase the number of cars with high American content. And that should mean American jobs.

The new treaty has flexibility for adjustments as we move along. That is important because there may not be another moment when we can get trade right — good for American and not just “the world,” as a whole.

Failure would obviously be recession. But failure would also be no new jobs, net.

Success would means more jobs in Lordstown and Detroit and Flint and Lansing and Toledo in automotive manufacturing — a transfer of jobs back from Mexico, which is already happening in small ways.

It would mean more jobs in American steel manufacturing.

But it also would mean more jobs not just in the South but where there once were jobs — in the Midwest and in America’s small cities and bigger towns — the places devastated by NAFTA.

Is this possible? The cynics say not. But the cynics said we would not come this far.

And the people who gave us NAFTA paid no price for the misery they wrought.

One thing is for sure: Keeping promises and fighting for American jobs, which the American left promised since Harry Truman and never lifted a finger to accomplish, are, if we can lay aside other corrosive distractions, two antidotes to cynicism.