Donald Trump's trade guy, Peter Navarro, proposed that America should spend roughly $2 trillion to bring manufacturing back to the United States from China.
Doing this would both strengthen American national and domestic security, and create an explosion in what could be very good-paying jobs for American workers.
While this would seem to be absolutely consistent with the positions Donald Trump campaigned on, it turns out his administration is actually opposed to it. Which has everybody scratching their heads.
Why would Trump tell Americans, over and over again for five years, that he wants to bring jobs home, and then reject a reasonable effort to do just that?
Is it because offshoring was always a Republican thing? Nixon, after all,opened us up to China, Reagan and HW Bush negotiated NAFTA, and the historic opposition to outsourcing has come from Democrats like
Senators Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders.
So is Trump just returning to Republican orthodoxy?
Or is there some other reason why he doesn't want to do anything genuinely proactive about bringing jobs back to America?
John Bolton's new book seems to put all this in context.
When you consider Trump's opposition to bringing manufacturing home to his requesting that President Xi of China help him in the 2020 campaign the way President Putin did in the 2016 campaign, it suddenly makes perfect sense.
Trump is hoping that China will mobilize its vast and sophisticated Internet capabilities, along with its extraordinary economic power, to make him look good, hurt Joe Biden, and help Donald Trump get reelected.
Therefore, he's not willing to risk upsetting China right now.
He is not only betraying our country and the values that underpin a democratic republic, but he is also selling out the hopes and dreams of the American working people.
Trump's craven and cowardly outreaches, in 2016 and now, to foreign governments asking for their help in corrupting an American election, is nothing short of treason.
