No, Trump has said at times that trade deficits as a whole were sometimes caused by other countries cheating. He has certainly said that.
But he has never said nor implied that in a single transaction a person who buys a foreign good is being cheated.
This is like arguing that microevolution exists but macroevolution (i.e. evolution) does not. Let’s just cut to the chase - Trump’s position on trade is bullshit, and people who believe Trump’s position on trade are suckers. There certainly are issues that can be addressed relating to protectionism, subsidies and violations of intellectual property, but Trump has never shown the necessary understanding or patience to deal with these, and he won’t get trained-seal cheering at his rallies if he tried. Better to just say that if the U.S. gives money to other countries to buy things, then the U.S. is losing money and is the victim, and reap the applause.
I don’t think you can make that leap. It is certainly possible that something in the aggregate can be bad without the individual parts of it being individually bad. If a person gets drunk tonight, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Everyone needs to unwind. But if the person gets drunk every day and night of their life, then that is very bad, but each instance on its own is not bad, but the accumulation certainly is.
As much as it will ruin my Christmas, I mostly agree with you. 
The protectionist rhetoric is bad for the country and free trade is good. Trump claims that he is only doing this temporarily to make the trade rules more fair for the United States, but you are right, many of his supporters hear “To hell with those foreigners.”
Instead of handwaiving those people away and calling them deplorables, the left needs to come up with a program that appeals to them. Many white people my age remember when our grandfathers, with a high school education, provided a solid middle class life for the entire family, with vacations and college tuition for the kids, and a house paid for free and clear. These guys feel bad that they are unable to pay the bills with the wife working as well because the only job they can get is at Dollar General. That is a real issue there. I agree with you that Trump isn’t solving it, but he is getting those people on his side.
What they hear from your side (it seems to them) is that the left doesn’t care about you because they are too busy caring about transgendered people and illegal aliens. I’m not saying that you should not care for those people, because that is who you are, but there seems to be nothing on your side for white middle America.
I didn’t say anything about alcohol consumption.
I know you didn’t, but I was trying to illustrate that something can be bad in the aggregate when each individual application of it is not bad. That’s why even though our trade with the EU, for example, might be a bad deal overall (hypothetically), it doesn’t mean I am getting cheated when I buy French cheese, and I took issue with your claim that Trump said something to that effect.
Oh, so you get to “illustrate” things by likening trade to alcohol consumption, but you have a problem when I illustrate idiotic statements about large-scale trade by likening it a hypothetical idiotic statement about small-scale trade. Got it.
Well, I mean, I thought you were implying that someone that mattered were making such a claim. Trump says all kinds of stupid stuff, and yet our country keeps functioning.
You raise a valid point, I respectfully recognize - Trump does indeed say (and tweet) a lot of dumb, ignorant things, but these utterances have no legal weight, or certainly none compared to the bills he signs (or vetoes), the executive orders he signs (or rescinds), the executive-branch policies he sets (or revokes) and the people he chooses to appoint (and the ones he demand resign).
It’s not at all unwise to wonder what one is being misdirected away from.
What do you do, though, when people remember things that simply are not true?
People your age - I don’t even need to know how old you are - did not hand grandfathers who were (on average) so much better off. People in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s struggled and scraped by just as much, if not more so, than today. The shape of the economy was different - more jobs in some sectors, but fewer in others, or even jobs that didn’t yet exist - but people were NOT better off. It’s a myth. My parents had some damn sleepless nights worrying about bills, and so did their parents. The median/average American today has more money and more stuff. In the short term - five years or so - it bounces up and down a little, depending on the economic cycle, but the trend has been generally, slowly, inexorably up since World War II.
Trumpists are NOT disproportionately people who are struggling in this economy. They are just as well off, if not more so, than other people. They are not likelier than Democrats to be struggling to make do by working at Dollar General.
So what is it the left is supposed to do about people imagining a past that was not?
Clinton really screwed this country over with NAFTA. Of course, thats when the other Democrats saw how many billions of dollars the Clintons were siphoning off us tax payers and turning a billion dollar profit off their “charities” which are nothing more than money laundering organizations for political criminals such as themselves. Also taking bribes from corporations to create NAFTA in the first place, so these companies could move to other countries to produce cheap garbage with cheap labor, and no restriction on their corporate avarice or criminal offenses.
And the Dems just ate it up like a free tax dollar buffet.
And now look where we are at. The Dems have been selling this country out from under us since. China has been purchasing billions of dollars of gold bouillon a year since, buying up as much of this countries real estate as they possibly can, and have bought around 1/4 of this countries companies that were founded here and were branded “American Institutions”…but are now owned by the Chinese. Obama was the worst. He turned a blind eye to everything. China bought more companies and more real estate under Obama’s reign of terror than any other previous traitor in the Oval Office.
The Dems and Libs despise Trump, because he’s interfering with all this free money being stuffed into their pockets by the Chinese and Mexicans to “look the other way”. Trump is only trying to stop the sale, rape, and invasion of this country by whatever means he can. Sure he’s a egotistical windbag, but obviously Trump is exactly what is needed to clean this country up from the destruction and tyranny that the Dems and Libs have done.
The constant infantile rantings from the Dems and Libs, as well as their fraudulent and failed witch hunt tactics have proven nothing more than how corrupt, demented, and anti-American they truly are.
When I was younger, Democrats were for the people. When a Dem was in the Oval Office, we had better jobs, better pay, better tax returns, and a better economic value over all. Republicans were for the rich, the big companies, and taxing us till they couldn’t tax us anymore. Since Clinton was in office, it’s all flipped. Now the Democrats are the corrupt ones trying to sell us out to the highest bidder and whoever will stuff as much money into their pockets as they can possibly get, while the Republicans are pro-American, for the people, for the country, for the protection and security of this nation as a whole, for better jobs, for a better life for Americans, and for cutting off all of our tax money going to other countries, who have existed on OUR resources for far too long.
If Trump is what it takes to clean this country up and cut out a vast majority of corruption, then I’m all for him.
Personally, I’m sick and tired of the Dems and Libs using the tax payers of this country as their own personal ATM.
Well that was something
As a Canadian, I’m glad to exploit the massive American plot by Democrats to literally throw the U.S.'s wealth away, as described by chaidragonfire.
Or I would if it, y’know, existed.
NAFTA was negotiated by the George HW Bush administration. Care to try again?
I, for one, strongly disapprove of the forty million jobs created since NAFTA was enacted. Compared to today, 1993 had better phones, better internet, better (safer! more efficient!) cars, better food, bigger homes, better cancer treatment, oh wait never mind I got my labels swapped. Carry on.
As Moriarty has pointed out, NAFTA was largely negotiated during the Bush administration, and it was a direct result of the FTA, which was created by the Reagan administration. If you don’t know basic stuff like that about NAFTA, maybe you need to spend a little more time learning the facts.
And pushed with a blazing white-hot fervor by Clinton, the original third way-er.
Yes yes, it was made under Bush 1, but no dispute he was an anti-working class jerk, as is Trump, faux populism notwithstanding. The V2.0 NAFTA is just lipstick on a pig. No way in hell will any of the so-called good new provisions have any meaningful effect on the negatives of V1.0 NAFTA. The corporate lobbyists and donors who shaped both versions would not have it, and are more than willing to work with both parties to maintain their gravy train.
Now back to our regularly scheduled oligarchy…“currently in progress”.
What specifically are your issues with NAFTA? I’m mildly curious how the American working class was harmed by it. Were Canadian and Mexican workers similarly affected?
Labor arbitrage, and it’s corrosive effects.
That’s a pretty generous application of the word “specifically”, but okay.
This is so vague as to be meaningless; it’s also without any evidence at all. Were labor arbitrage post-NAFTA a negative to American workers, either unemployment would be higher, wages would be lower, or both. Unemployment is lower, and wages are higher.