[CTC] Democrats target Trump on trade

[Arthur Stamoulis]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/democrats-target-trump-on-trade/2017/09/02/2dfbabf8-8f5f-11e7-8df5-c2e5cf46c1e2_story.html?utm_term=.a5a139cc0a8f

Democrats target Trump on trade

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Democrats facing reelection next year in states
President Trump won are seizing on trade at this early stage as a crucial
issue and a Republican vulnerability.

But rather than jeer Trump’s protectionist positions, Democrats are echoing
them and amplifying them, arguing that Trump has failed to fulfill his
dramatic campaign promise to rip apart trade deals.

“When we say renegotiating NAFTA, we mean a transformation, something
substantial, not just going through the motions,” Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr.
(D-Pa.) told union leaders recently, referring to the administration’s
talks over the North American Free Trade Agreement.

For Democrats, Casey’s pitch signals a wholehearted revival of their labor
roots and a sharp departure from the free-trade tilt of the past two
Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

The change may also be necessary. While progressive activists are highly
motivated against Trump and some suburban voters are increasingly uneasy
about Trump’s disposition, many working-class voters remain resentful of
globalization and have lingering appreciation for Trump’s populist appeals.

To win them back, Casey is making regular visits to Rust Belt cities,
including Wilkes-Barre, which sits in Luzerne County in northeastern
Pennsylvania. Both Luzerne and Pennsylvania went for Trump in the 2016
presidential election after more than two decades as Democratic strongholds.

“When China cheats, Pennsylvania loses jobs,” Casey told the group — all
white men — at Local 44, a sheet-metal workers’ outpost. “We have to be
much tougher in going after the cheaters of the world.”

Casey is following a playbook laid out by Senate Minority Leader Charles E.
Schumer (D-N.Y.). As Schumer stares down a difficult 2018 election map for
Democrats and tries to upend Republicans’ 52-seat control of the Senate, he
has urged his colleagues to bring trade to the fore.

“Nothing, nothing is more central,” Schumer said last month at a news
conference announcing proposals that included creating a “trade prosecutor”
to supplement the work of the U.S. trade representative and a bevy of
measures to stifle foreign competition and block overseas investments.

Schumer added, “The problem is President Trump has talked a good game and
done virtually nothing on trade but study it. . . . We need action.”

As Schumer called China a “rapacious” trade partner, standing alongside the
New Yorker were several Democratic senators running next year in states
Trump carried: Casey, Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Tammy
Baldwin (Wis.), and Debbie Stabenow (Mich.).

House Democrats, who see a chance to take back control of their chamber if
Trump’s approval rating sinks, are also on board. Last month their
leadership and Schumer jointly unveiled a “Better Deal” agenda that pledged
to “crack down” on trade practices.

The effort has been countered by Republicans. Donnelly, in particular, has
been targeted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee as “Mexico
Joe” over his past work for a family-run business that manufactured
products in that country. (Donnelly has since sold his stock in the
company.)

Donnelly met late last month with steelworkers in Indiana, a state Trump
won by 19 percentage points, to assure them he was on their side. “I voted
against every bad trade deal that’s come along,” he said.

But the GOP response beyond opposition research and allegations of
hypocrisy has been scattered. Republican congressional leaders remain leery
of Trump’s eagerness to impose tariffs and continue to embrace free trade.

“I’m a little concerned about some of the trade rhetoric, not only by the
president, who succeeded, but by the people who were running against him,”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last month at the
Kentucky State Fair. “We still have a selling job to most Americans that
trade is a winner for America. We’ve been a great trading nation going back
to the founding of the country.”

Democrats’ push comes as Trump struggles to follow through on his ambitions
to overhaul trade policy.

Early moves by the administration — withdrawing the United States from the
Trans-Pacific Partnership in January and appointing Robert E. Lighthizer,
who has a protectionist bent, as U.S. trade representative — have been
followed by a string of fits and starts.

Trump authorized Lighthizer last month to consider investigating China’s
trade policies on intellectual property, but it could take a year for a
decision on a formal probe to be made. Proposed steel tariffs have stalled
amid squabbles, and Trump’s manufacturing council was disbanded in the wake
of an uproar over the president’s equivocal response to violence during
rallies by white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Inside the White House, there is tumult over the direction of policy.

Stephen K. Bannon, who was the administration’s ardent advocate for
nationalist trade policies, has left his position as Trump’s chief
strategist. National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, a former
president of Goldman Sachs, has become a powerful force in the West Wing
but has expressed disapproval of the president’s hard-line instincts on
trade, according to administration officials who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to describe private conversations.

Trump has also fumed about the slow pace on trade and complained to aides
that U.S. trade rivals have taken notice of how one of his signature issues
has become mired by deliberation, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the outcome of the ongoing NAFTA negotiations with Mexico and
Canada, which began their second round Friday after months of turbulence,
is unclear. Trump tweeted last week: “both being very difficult, may have
to terminate?”

Democrats see the murky future of Trump’s trade planks as an opportunity to
reclaim the issue as their own.

Casey, 57, who has a gentle cadence and has long kept a low profile in the
Senate, may be showing the way.

As Casey prepares to run for a third term, he has stepped out on Twitter
with scathing messages about Trump that have given him fame of sorts with
younger voters and with the Democratic base. His town halls have drawn big
crowds of college students, and well-educated Trump critics like him.

Casey, however, is not counting on riding the Trump resistance alone to
reelection. Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.), a Trump supporter who has built a
national following because of his deeply conservative views on immigration,
announced a Senate run late last month, probably counting on Trump’s
enthusiastic support should he win the Republican nomination.

So when he is not in Washington, Casey and his staffers can be found riding
around Pennsylvania to huddle with union leaders and meet with elderly
voters — many of them retired union members. On one recent weekday, he
hustled from a packed forum on aging to the Wilkes-Barre union hall and
then to a tour of infrastructure projects at Scranton’s airport, followed
by handshakes at a happy hour.

“A lot of the votes that Trump got were from Democratic voters,” Casey said
in an interview. “You had to ask yourself, ‘Why is that? Why did that
happen?’ You just get ready to get to places where you may not be on a
regular basis. We’ve been going to a lot of small-town and rural areas over
the last seven, eight months.”

It is not a campaign yet, but it has the feel of a summer test run.

And after years of delicately commenting on trade during the Obama
presidency as the president pursued trade deals — he was a reliable Obama
ally — Casey is back to being what he was at the start of his career and
what his late father, the former governor Robert P. Casey Sr., was before
him: an unabashed champion of labor.

“I know it’s been awfully difficult. If there is one group of Americans the
right has targeted for years, it’s the men and women of organized labor,”
Casey told the men at Local 44. “We’ve got a long way to go fighting back
against those forces and at the same time raising wages, and all of that is
undermined by bad trade deals.”

Left mostly unmentioned during Casey’s stops throughout the day and in his
small talks with voters were the federal investigations into Russian
interference in last year’s election. The culture wars were dormant. Casey
is a Roman Catholic who opposes abortion, and that issue has roiled his
past races, but no one brought it up.

The reception at the union gathering for Casey, lanky and clad in a blazer
and loafers among burly men in T-shirts and jeans, spanned from polite to
warm. He listened intently, never raised his voice and said what they
wanted to hear.

“I’m getting tired of these promises from Trump,” Joe Padavan of the United
Steelworkers told a nodding Casey. “We’re losing health care, we’re losing
pensions, and all products should be made in America.”

There was a flash of awkwardness. When Warren Faust, who works in
construction, mentioned an ethnic slur that some workers use to describe
metal made in China, Casey did not correct him.

Later, at lunch nearby, Casey said he wished he had spoken up.

“It’s difficult,” he said. “We all have to be vigilant about that. Maybe I
should have said something to him.”

The moment was nonetheless telling. As Democrats go all in on trade, they
also are navigating minefields of grievance that have only expanded since
Trump took office, and grievance can be ugly.

But mine they must.



Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826
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