By this point in the election cycle, we should be hearing about the two candidates’ visions for the next four years. Trump should hammer these five things.
The coronavirus pandemic and recession that followed make it hard for any other news to make it to the front page, but the end of the tragedy is in sight. Just this week, researchers at Oxford announced positive results in human trials for their vaccine. Even if we are not yet at the beginning of the end, we may be, as Winston Churchill once said, at the end of the beginning. That means it might be time, at last, for the presidential campaign to focus on more than the pandemic. By this point in the election cycle, we should be hearing about the two candidates’ visions for the next four years. Looking at President Trump’s statements and actions over the past few years, one can discern a pattern. Overall, it comes down to the idea of protecting American freedom in all its forms. Emphasizing these five themes of protection could summarize for voters what they would get from four more years of Trump in the White House. If there is one way in which Trump departed from Republican orthodoxy in 2016, it was on trade protection. Maintaining this message is paramount. The importance of jobs and the meaning of work used to be recognized across party lines in America. Increasingly, however, voices on the left are discarding the universal virtue of industriousness and advocating instead for a managed decline in which vast swaths of the populace are considered unemployable. Many moderates in both parties would respond to a message of getting more people off welfare and into jobs. How could Trump sharpen this message for voters? Managed trade has been his signature issue and his most consistent belief since the 1980s. Trump has been free in using temporary tariffs to gain concessions from communist China, but that and even the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement are just tinkering at the edges of free trade. He should declare the rules of the game have changed and work with Congress to erect tariff barriers on unfree economies such as China. China outcompetes us on price because it uses state power to suppress wages, break unions, ignore environmental regulations, and operate state-owned businesses at a loss. Tariffs on China’s goods would not ban these products; it would merely put them on an equal footing with goods made in a free country. Beyond that, Trump and Congress should ban the import of goods produced with the slave labor of Uyghur prisoners, which we now know is increasingly common in China. Many in Trump’s own party will call this an industrial policy, and they will be right. But our steadfast refusal to make such a policy does not mean we don’t have one. It means we have China’s industrial policy, imposed on us without our consent. Replace that with a policy that favors American jobs and trade with countries that operate honestly, and Trump will have achieved the biggest part of his 2016 agenda. Many 2020 voters will appreciate that and understand the contrast with Joe Biden’s willful blindness on communist China. Another signature 2016 campaign issue was Trump’s promise to enforce immigration laws. He has largely followed through on this policy, although mishandling of minors caught illegally immigrating significant damaged the administration. Arranging more humane detention centers and speeding up the judicial process for asylum claims could resolve that problem while keeping the promise of law enforcement.
