President Trump, in a stunning reversal, told a gathering of farm state lawmakers and governors on Thursday morning that he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal he pulled out of within days of assuming the presidency.
Ramesh Ponnuru says: “It would be easy for Trump critics to use this episode to point out the thoughtlessness and malleability of some Trump stances and the emptiness of some of his words. Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) is probably right, though, to take the high road.”
I applaud Sasse’s forbearance, but I’m not really in a high-road mood these days. My guess is that our moron-in-chief has finally figured out that TPP was, to a large extent, explicitly designed to create a trade region that excludes China, so now he’s suddenly interested in it. Or, more to the point, he says he is. I doubt that Trump actually cares much about it except as a way to make China nervous, since this kind of dimwitted bluffing is really all he knows. I imagine he’ll lose interest once the China trade war has played out. TPP haters can probably relax.
