Chap. 21: Taking Back Trump's America Serialization

Twenty-One: The Last MAGA Tango in Clyde

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

For eight years, Whirlpool begged the Obama-Biden administration who did nothing to protect American workers from the flagrant dumping of foreign washers, dryers into America. But your cries for help fell on deaf ears. You didn’t see any action. They didn’t act, they didn’t care, and they never will…. In defending your jobs here at Whirlpool, I was doing exactly what I promised in June, 2016.

Trump Jobs Plan Speech, Whirlpool Corporation, August 6, 2020

In the early 1980s, as I was in the midst of my PhD studies in economics at Harvard University, temptation reared its seductive head. Professor Murray Weidenbaum of Washington University in St. Louis invited me to join him as a speechwriter in the White House where he had taken a position as the Chairman of The Council of Economic Advisors.

I had come to Murray’s attention because of the work I had done on a series of regulatory failures afflicting the electric utility industry; and to say that I was intrigued, flattered, and yes, tempted by the offer would be to understate the obvious. Yet I would decline that offer because I feared that if I interrupted my doctoral studies, I might never make it back to the banks of the Charles River to finish my PhD thesis.

I tell you this story because once I got to the White House – perhaps because of that memory lingering in my mind – I began to develop a hankering to have at least some hand in the Boss’ speeches. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, that hankering was in full bloom as it seemed to me that the Boss’ rally speeches were in urgent need of a MAGA reboot. To that end, I hatched a plot to pitch directly to the President a major policy address on the theme of American manufacturing.

An Homage to Pittsburgh

Now I know that a Trump manufacturing speech doesn’t sound all that original. But my special sauce in this venture was to make that major address an homage to the epic 2016 Pittsburgh Jobs Plan and its seven major campaign promises that we talked about in Chapter Four.

My idea for this new 2020 speech was to first remind folks how we had kept those promises and then unveil six new ones, each specifically aimed at wooing the Blue Wall states and thereby keeping them in the Trump column in 2020. And here was the best part of the plan I would hatch:

The Boss would deliver this major policy address at a booming Whirlpool washing machine factory smack dab in the middle of the Rust Belt. This was a Phoenix that had risen from the ashes of unfair trade by way of some big beautiful tariffs President Trump had slapped on the trade cheaters – and what better way to showcase our America First trade policy than at Whirlpool.

The battle over the Whirlpool tariffs had been one of my biggest fights early in the 2017 administration with the Gary Cohn-Steve Mnuchin-Rob Porter Globalist faction of the West Wing. It had all started with a visit to my office by Sarah Bovim, a quintessential Washington, DC lobbyist Swamp Creature.

Petite, attractive, intense, with a diamond ring on her hand almost as big as she is, Sarah had reached out to ask for my help in fending off a sustained mercantilist attack from both the Chinese and the Koreans. My only rule in listening to such Swamp Creatures was whether my help would create more jobs for blue collar Americans.

If not, I would send them briskly and abruptly on their way. But if the answer was yes, – and this was the culture of my small office – I would move on the request in quintessential Trump Time, which is to say, as quickly as possible.

The Whirlpool case is fascinating because it illustrates just how difficult it is for American manufacturers to defend their factories and workers within the loose rules not just of the World Trade Organization, but also of the primary Federal agency involved in the adjudication of trade disputes, the United States International Trade Commission (ITC).

Now you might think that a Federal agency like the ITC would lean towards the side of American workers when adjudicating the many cases that come before it. But think again as this is yet another American agency that has been at least partly captured by American multinational companies that love to offshore American jobs.

This is an agency captured, too, often times, by well-heeled foreign manufacturers. They assiduously leverage the large armies of American-born lobbyists camped along DC’s infamous K Street corridor, which is less than a mile from the White House and a cannon shot from Capitol Hill.

My broader point here is that it is not always easy for companies like Whirlpool, which is a quintessential

In the Whirlpool case, its difficulties began when two of its Korean competitors – LG and Samsung – began dumping large quantities of subsidized washing machines into American markets from South Korea and Mexico. Whirlpool responded by filing its first anti-dumping case – and actually won that case in 2013. But here’s the plot twist:

While the mercantilist Koreans were supposed to ante up countervailing duties per the court’s ruling, both LG and Samsung chose to evade such duties. They did so by moving their production to Communist China in a scurrilous practice known as “country-hopping.”.

Beaten but unbowed, Whirlpool filed a second case; and in 2017, they were rewarded with a new anti-dumping order against LG and Samsung for the Made in Communist China washers. However, instead of paying the new tariffs, the Koreans just country-hopped again, moving their production to Vietnam and Thailand.

When I met with Sarah and her team, she was beside herself and Whirlpool’s CEO Marc Bitzer was at his wit’s end. This country-hopping and serial dumping was seemingly impossible to stop.