Populist conservative author and columnist Pat Buchanan says the “monster of China” that President Donald Trump is currently working to get under control is “the baby of the Republican Party free traders.”
In an interview with Laura Ingraham, Buchanan slammed the corporatist, free-trade wing of the GOP, blaming them for the economic superpower that China has become.
“All these things to enable China, then brought them into the WTO with all the Republicans and the Bush-ites and the whole gang. They did it,” Buchanan said. “They built up … and that monster of China that you see today is the baby of the Republican Party free traders.”
Buchanan also said that Trump’s economic nationalism is a “Republican tradition” when it comes to fair trade, staying out of foreign wars, and ending mass immigration:
The old great Republican tradition was economic nationalism. Republican presidents built the great American economy from 1860 to 1930. They built it. As for what they call “isolationism,” it merely meant staying out of foreign wars where we don’t have any vital interest in peril. That was a Republican tradition.
Immigration laws. The immigration laws were written by when Republicans controlled the country. I mean they were fairly strict in many cases, maybe too strict people say, but these ideas predate even the great John Boehner.
What they call “populism” is very much “traditionalism” and very much old Republicanism.
As Breitbart News chronicled, the majority of likely Republican voters say that free trade has hurt the United States and led to mass layoffs of American workers. A majority of black Americans also say that free trade leads to Americans losing their jobs.
Since 2001, free trade with China has cost millions of Americans their jobs, as Breitbart News noted. Of the 3.4 million U.S. jobs lost in that time period, about 2.6 million were lost in the crippled manufacturing industry, making up about three-fourths of the loss of jobs from the U.S.-Chinese trade deficit.
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With free trade, foreign markets have been readily opened to multinational corporations, allowing them to offshore American jobs while easily exporting their products back into the U.S.
The Rust Belt has been one of the hardest regions hit because of U.S. free trade with Mexico. In total, about 700,000 U.S. workers have been displaced, including:
- 14,500 American workers displaced in Wisconsin
- 43,600 American workers displaced in Michigan
- 2,600 American workers displaced in West Virginia
- 26,300 American workers displaced in Pennsylvania
- 34,900 American workers displaced in Ohio
- 34,300 American workers displaced in New York
- 6,500 American workers displaced in Iowa
- 24,400 American workers displaced in Indiana
- 34,700 American workers displaced in Illinois
Meanwhile, since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in the 1990s, at least one million net U.S. jobs have been lost because of the free trade deal. Between 2000 and 2014, there have been about five million manufacturing jobs lost across the country as trade deficits continue soaring.
One former steel town in West Virginia lost 94 percent of its steel jobs because of NAFTA, with nearly 10,000 workers in the town being displaced from the steel industry.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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