I wrote for Politico today about Trump’s trade speech:

Donald Trump is an optimist. He believes there is nothing wrong with America that autarky can’t fix.
Trump’s economic speech this week was a high-octane assault on the American free-trade regime that has been a matter of a bipartisan consensus for decades and a bulwark of the post-World War II international order — not to mention an article of GOP economic orthodoxy.
It’s not necessarily a problem that the Republican presidential nominee is crosswise with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or is speaking in a more populist voice, or is mindful of the human costs that are often neglected in the elite consensus in favor of open trade.
One can imagine a Republican candidate doing all those things without lurching into cut-rate AFL-CIO economics. Trump thinks he can appeal to Bernie Sanders voters. He’d be right if all the Sanders cadres cared about was the simplistic, conspiracy-tinged belief that the American economy is “rigged” and can be righted only by government intervention — a view shared by their socialist champion and the Republican business mogul.
If policy on this issue is all that mattered, the protectionist Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown should be on Trump’s VP short list as well as Hillary’s.