Chap 19: Taking Back Trump's America Serialization

The Iron MAGA Triangle of Populist Economic Nationalism

Enjoy the read! The entire book is available on Amazon.

The man who has defied the expectations of political observers at every turn delivered his biggest surprise yet Tuesday night, beating Clinton by barreling through the so-called blue wall of states that had not been carried by a Republican in decades. … This clean sweep through the Rust Belt — netting 64 electoral votes, the exact number by which Mitt Romney fell short of the presidency four years ago — clinched the White House for Trump.

National Review, November 9, 2016

In 2016, we danced our way to victory by running on a Populist Economic Nationalist platform. Along our merry, jitterbugging way, the Democrat’s vaunted Blue Wall of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania crumbled, Wall Street gasped, Hillaryites wept, and Donald J. Trump transformed the Republican Party of champagne, Davos, and Wall Street into the beer joints and State Fairs of Main Street.

If there ever were a case of “you should dance with the one that brung ya,” our 2020 Presidential Election strategy certainly should have been it. Yet, by not doubling down hard on a Populist Economic Nationalist platform in the 2020 election aimed squarely at the Blue Wall, President Trump’s campaign team engineered a strategic failure every bit as egregious as its failure to run on a credible Tough on China platform.

In 2020, we would lose all 46 Electoral College votes we had captured in 2016 in the Blue Wall states of Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20), and Wisconsin (10). That would turn the Trump red tide into a wave of Biden blue and be the difference between having a people’s lion versus a Globalist puppet in the Oval Office.¹⁴⁰

This strategic failure was a massive miscalculation that boiled down to one stark reality: All too often, we not only forgot how we had captured the White House, we forgot who we in Trump Land were supposed to be.

Economic Nationalism and the Trump Presidency

The seeds of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy together with the seeds of America’s Populist Economic Nationalist movement were planted by three major, and highly destructive, seismic shifts in American economic history.

The first – a solid 9.0 on the free and unfair trade Richter scale – was the North American Free Trade Act signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. NAFTA would not only jumpstart a massive offshoring of American factory jobs to the sweatshops and maquiladoras of Mexico; “SHAFTA,” as it would be derisively called, would also catalyze North America’s largest mass migration, one involving millions of Mexican campesinos.

The role of NAFTA in triggering successive waves of illegal immigration is generally far less understood than the job-crushing impact NAFTA would have on America’s manufacturing base.

The smack-talking Texas billionaire Ross Perot would describe this blow to American manufacturing as a “giant sucking sound” in his own 1992 presidential run.

Yet, Mexico would have its own version of Perot’s giant sucking sound. As El Mexico let its own agricultural trade barriers down under NAFTA, America’s highly efficient corn farmers would inundate Mexico with their fertile and literally dirt cheap exports.

While tortillas made with American corn became a few pesos cheaper in the mercados across Mexico after NAFTA kicked in – just like Made in Mexico automobiles were a little cheaper after NAFTA in the United States – millions of Mexican farmers would be kicked off their hardscrabble peasant plots right to the curb and forced to begin that long, winding, and dangerous journey to El Norte.

In a phenomenon known as “chain migration,” these NAFTA refugees would, over time, be followed by millions more of their family members and relatives. With the help of often rapacious “coyotes” to facilitate this human traffic, this mass of humanity cum cheap labor would enter the United States and thereby help to severely depress the wages of lower income Americans, who disproportionately were blue collar Blacks and, not without irony, Hispanic-Americans.

Over time, these negative, illegal immigration effects on Black and Brown and Blue Collar America would begin to drive a Deplorables wedge between the Democrat Party and several of its traditional bedrock constituencies.