Donald Trump just got done giving a speech, staged appropriately in front of a pile of recycled trash, about the evils of trade. This has, of course, been one of his consistent campaign themes—that incompetent (or possibly courrupt) U.S. politicians (especially Bill and Hillary Clinton) have sold out U.S. workers in one bad trade deal after another, and that only he, Donald Trump, is willing to stand up for the interests of American blue-collar workers. (He even had a charming, seemingly ad libbed aside in this speech about how presidents after him might go back to mucking things up.)
Because, like an elephant, the internet never forgets, some writers have been having fun remembering the days when Trump wasn't so sour on the idea of sending jobs overseas. NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald pulled up this 2005 gem from the Trump University blog, titled, “Outsourcing Creates Jobs in the Long Run.” [...]
But it does add to the sense that his opinions on globalization can be a bit mushy, or, you know, hypocritical. Before he was praising Brexit, he once wrote a Davos-pegged op-ed for CNN praising Europe and saying that we'd have to “leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability,” whatever that meant. There's the fact that the anti-immigration demagogue and friend of the American worker happily uses seasonal guest workers at his Florida golf clubs (he says he can't find qualified Americans to work short term, which seems like a fairly weak excuse). Then there are his clothing lines, which are of course made overseas. He says it's difficult to have apparel manufactured here (that'd be true, if he added the words "cheaply" to the end of that sentence). Add it all up, and you get the impression the man might not have cared all too deeply about the plight of middle-class wage earners until recently. Perhaps we should start calling him a born-again protectionist.
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