Will Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policies deliver the objectives his voters hope? The answer is: no. The most important objective of all has been to create a great number of new manufacturing jobs. This is the promise held out to former industrial workers and the ruined places in which many of them live. Unfortunately, it is fraudulent. Trump is governing in the interests of himself, but also of the plutocracy whom many of these people blame, not altogether wrongly, for their plight.
Robert Lawrence of Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Peterson Institute for International Economics has done the numbers in “Closing the trade deficit would barely raise the share of US manufacturing employment”, published in June. He asks how much additional employment would be generated if the trade deficit in manufacturing were eliminated by Trump’s protectionism. Since deficits are Trump’s obsession, this is the right question.