Donald Trump, job killer

How Trump's belligerent NAFTA stance will cost America untold jobs

A worker at Honda's Indiana plant in 2011.
(Image credit: MIRA OBERMAN/AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump is a proud America First protectionist. And yet, the poison pills he injected into the latest round of NAFTA negotiations will not only likely kill NAFTA — which he has derided as the "worst trade deal ever" — but also his own agenda of preserving American manufacturing jobs. Behold America's job killer in chief!

That the latest negotiations weren't going to be a kumbaya session was clear when, on their eve, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross penned an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that the $70 billion trade deficit (the gap between the goods and services America exports to its trading partners and those it imports from them) between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada was costing more American jobs than ever before. He claimed that the percentage of U.S. content in manufactured goods coming to America from Mexico fell 10 points and Canada 6 points between 1995 and 2011. What was even worse, in his view, was that these non-American goods weren't even made in Mexico and Canada. Instead, our North American partners were getting them from other parts of the world, especially Asia. This meant that NAFTA was bleeding jobs not only from America, but from North America, defeating the entire purpose of the agreement which was "to advantage those within the agreement — not to help outsiders."

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.