Richard Grenell, the former Acting Director of National Intelligence and former United States Ambassador to Germany, torched “unlimited globalization” and it’s devastating impact on America’s working and middle class during his speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC).
“No candidate [in the Republican presidential primary in 2015] could bring themselves to admit that something had gone badly wrong with American foreign policy. That the American voter, the American soldier, and the American taxpayer had all been let down,” Grenell said. “Except for one – Donald Trump.” Grenell went on to say:
After the end of the Cold War, Democrats and Republicans in Washington bought into the illusion that the whole world would start to resemble America. And so they started to pursue unlimited globalization. They welcomed China into the World Trade Organization … but they didn’t ground any of it in the interests of the average American.
Grenell added:
So for decades, while Washington politicians built a global system, American wages stagnated. Our great cities and industries were hollowed out. Entire communities were devasted, and our manufacturing plants were shipped off to China. That’s what happened when Washington stopped being the capital of the United States, and started being the capital of the world.
Grenell panned “China sympathizers” and “globalization fanatics,” saying they have no place in the decision making of President Trump’s administration.
In January, the New York Times acknowledged the boom of support for Trump’s economic nationalist agenda among working class and middle class Americans who had been betrayed by 30 years of globalization consensus among Republicans and Democrats.
Breitbart News has chronicled Trump’s shift of the GOP to one that looks out for the needs of the nation’s working and middle-class workforce with tariffs, tight labor markets, and an anti-outsourcing agenda — far from the party’s business-centric, economic libertarian platform that helped lose the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.
Meanwhile, Democrat voters — increasingly concentrated in large metropolises — and their elected officials have become a party opposed to protecting American workers from the negative impacts of free trade.
A December 2019 Economist/YouGov poll found that the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, nearly 7-in-10 or 69 percent, say tariffs on foreign imports “help” or “neither help nor hurt” the U.S. economy. The plurality of those Republicans, 43 percent, said tariffs help the U.S. economy. Only 16 percent of Republicans today say tariffs “hurt” the U.S. economy.
Likewise, in May, a survey revealed huge support for an economic nationalist agenda with about 66 percent of Americans support increasing tariffs on foreign imports while only 34 percent want more free trade agreements between the U.S. and other countries.
The survey showed Americans are increasingly tired of their goods being made in China. Today, about 4-in-10 Americans say they will not buy products imported from China. A plurality of about 34 percent of the 60 percent of Americans who said they will still buy products from China said they will do so but do not like the fact that they are made in China.
As Breitbart News has chronicled, decades-long free trade deals, NAFTA, and China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) eliminated about five million American manufacturing jobs and 50,000 U.S. manufacturing plants since 1994. American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy, as every one manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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