Trumps attacks on rigged trade deals resonated with communities devastated by mass job offshoring [View all]
TPP: How Obama Traded Away His Legacy
Lori Wallach and Murshed Zaheed
Huffington Post
And President Obama still wont face the sorry truth, this week declaring that he would have beaten Trump if he had been the candidate. After years of siding with corporate America to pass various job-killing trade deals over the opposition of congressional Democrats, he announced that it was nonsense that anyone should have the view that Democrats have somehow abandoned the white working class.
Yet in fact, post-election polling and exit polls confirm that Trump flipped decisive states because he connected with voters fury about job-killing trade deals.
Trumps omnipresent attacks on rigged trade deals resonated with communities devastated by mass job offshoring. Polling shows that Americans viewed President Obamas TPP as a corporate power grab that would cost more jobs, lower wages and raise medicine prices.
Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by 23,000, 11,000 and 68,000 votes, respectively. The number of people in those states certified as having lost jobs to trade since the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, is 78,331, 159,252 and 182,017 under just one government program that captures a fraction of trade-related job loss.