NYTimes | Last
March, Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee filed
into a Capitol Hill conference room to discuss trade. The Obama
administration, negotiating a trade pact with Pacific Rim nations, was
seeking congressional approval to fast-track the deal. Opposition was
intense not only among labor unions, but among many Republican voters,
while the party’s leadership, atypically, was supporting Mr. Obama’s
effort.
For
help, the lawmakers turned to Frank Luntz, the Republican messaging
guru. For two decades, Mr. Luntz had instructed Republicans on how to
talk about thorny issues. Do not say “estate tax.” Say “death tax.” Do not privatize Social Security. “Personalize” it.
Few
issues were now as dangerous to them as trade, Mr. Luntz told the
lawmakers, especially a trade pact sought by a president their voters
hated. Many Americans did not believe that the economic benefits of
trade deals trickled down to their neighborhoods. They did not care if
free trade provided them with cheaper socks and cellphones. Most
believed free trade benefited other countries, not their own.
“I
told them to stop calling it free trade, and start calling it American
trade,” Mr. Luntz said in an interview. “American businesses, American
services — American, American, American!”
While
Republicans debated rhetorical approaches, Mr. Trump took a radically
different tack. Announcing his campaign a few months later, he spun a tale
of unfair trade deals hashed out by lobbyists, backscratchers and
incompetent presidents who were stealing jobs from Americans. He would
stop the flow of jobs over the border with Mexico, Mr. Trump promised,
and build a wall to stop the flow of people.
That
message has resonated with lower-income voters, and helped drive Mr.
Trump’s string of successes. In Mississippi and Michigan, both of which
Mr. Trump won, six in 10 Republican primary voters said that free trade
cost the country more jobs that it produced, exit polls showed.
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