David J. Lynch

The president's view is that just about everything that went wrong in U.S.

manufacturing communities is the fault of free trade agreements that we started in the 1990s.

and pursued for some time thereafter.

Mainstream economists, of course, will say, look, much of the manufacturing job loss was due to automation.

That would have happened anyway, just like the automation we've seen over the decades in farming.

We can produce a lot more food today than we could 100 years ago with a lot fewer people on the farms.

Same is true in manufacturing.

But of course, trade did have an impact.

And where

particularly the opening to China or China's integration into the global trading system, really had an impact was on specific manufacturing communities and specific cohorts of people, specific groups of people.

Those with the least education and the fewest skills, they really took it in the chops.

Political leaders, starting back with Bill Clinton and subsequently said, don't worry, we're going to take care of those people.

And where the gamble went wrong, where, I argue in the book, the bargain was not upheld, was that part never happened, the domestic policy response that there should have been to make sure that everybody could benefit from this global integration, which to some degree is unstoppable.

It's just the way things are going.

But we left people unprotected, and they suffered as a consequence, and there was a political blowback from that, which leads you to Donald Trump.

Yeah, I think the controversy is that he's the first president to use this almost 50-year-old law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEPA is the acronym.

He's the first president to see in that law a power to impose tariffs.

It's the standard law that presidents of both parties have used to impose financial sanctions and economic sanctions, like those we put on Russia, those we put on some Chinese actors,

of the Iranians, et cetera, over the years.

So that's part of the controversy.