Lesson for Europe on trade: Trump's bark looks worse than his bite
 The big mistake the western establishment made about the US presidential election was to take Donald Trump literally, but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously, not literally.
So said obscure Pennsylvania pundit Salena Zito, who contributes to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. What she said has since become the main take-away of the entire election.
Today, there is enough evidence to support her contention, showing Trump's bark is worse than his bite on China, free trade and a range of other issues. There are often unsavoury aspect of trade agreements that can be attacked ferociously without risk to the substance of these accords.
And having spurned campaign contributions from special interest groups that create smelly side deals, President Trump has a free hand to eliminate them as no other president, be he Republican or Democrat, has ever had before.
Moreover, his showmanship in dealing with a leftist media is such that he may well have the press performing like Pavlovian dogs before his first term is out.
Thus, one finds it surprising that the same mistake that so many made in the election campaign is being made again by others who should know better.
Put another way, what Ms Zito said was that Trump spoke in a constant flow of hyperbole, "we are going to stop China from raping us" or in eye-catching, but meaningless phrases like "we will tax those [expletive deleted] 24 per cent!".
It was just the sort of language to get out the low-skilled male first-time voters, who were probably notionally Democrats, and heighten the fury of the left-liberal establishment, which raged noisily in protest, thus arousing the determination of these men to get out and vote for him even more.
But like so many, FedEx chief and founder Fred Smith appears to have been taken in too by the same old media meme. He too has railed against Trump's anti-free trade rhetoric, failing to appreciate that it is just that - rhetoric, that is, unsubstantiated nonsense that is less policy statement than a spiritual direction.
For much of this effect we must thank the reigning leftist media ethic in the west, and its hyper sensitivity to violations of political correctness, which finds it outrageous that Trump would dare to tell Jewish Republicans, "Like you people, I am a negotiator".
In another exchange in Forbes magazine we find the same misunderstanding from both right and left. On the right, Tim Worstall, a senior fellow of Britain's Adam Smith Institute, finds common ground with erstwhile foe Paul Krugman, the leftist Nobel economics laureate and New York Times pundit.
Mr Krugman first sneers at Donald Trump's "supposed ideas" about trade. "It isn't so much that trade with China, unbalanced trade, is damaging to the American economy, or that it is beneficial," he says with vague ambiguity. "Economists are all pretty certain that it is beneficial, but that's not quite the point.
"I'd argue the way to think about the coming Trump shock is you can't really turn the clock back a quarter-century; but even trying can produce exactly the kind of rapid, disruptive shifts in production that fed blue-collar anger going into this election."
To this rightist Worstall says: "I see absolutely no difference with being allowed to buy, or not allowed to buy, as I wish from the guy in the same village and being able to do so with someone on the other side of the world."
But at least Mr Worstall comes to the nub of the problem, that is, free trade benefits consumers, but the jobs western workers have been promised have not come. Lower skilled jobs have been outsourced overseas. What European and American workers who still have low-skilled, but well-paid, jobs have fewer of them to go to and more and more of them are disappearing.
On this, Mr Worstall makes a foggy concession: "Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences. Better understanding when and where trade is costly are key items on the research agenda for trade and labour economists."
While a better understanding may well be needed, it is doubtful that it is one of the "key items of the research agenda" any more than sceptical global warming inquiry is a key item on the climate change research agenda. Both have been subject to public debates with only one socially acceptable side - until now.
Why? Because highlighting the costs of free trade - or counter measures against global warming - hardly serves to sell either. And that's where the money is - not fretting about costs that must be met by low-skilled labour in both cases.
But here Mr Worstall differs: "I do not, in the slightest, believe that trade with China has been bad for the economy nor its workers. Trade makes no difference at all to the number of jobs in an economy - only to which jobs are done, not the number of them."
But saying there are other jobs to do - much less the same number - is meaningless. It's like saying: Sorry, we don't have jobs for low-skilled workers, but we have plenty of jobs for the highly-skilled.
That ignores that Europe and America is oversupplied with the low-skilled people. At one time, optimists said if borders were only opened, low skilled workers could go to where they were needed. But the Arab Spring and its aftermath dampened such economic ecumenicism in the west, even among those who hoped labour would have the same transnational freedom as capital.
Sadly, there is no US Army Corps of Educators to ride into the rescue to fulfil dreams and schemes of retraining to close the skill gap. And nor is one likely to be given the fact that highly skilled work demands determination and intelligence to acquire skills few possess. Such cannot be handed out with social security payments, but must be earned by dint of one's own efforts and intelligence.
So what is President Trump to do? While no one cannot say for sure, it appears that a modus operanti is taking shape. The retention of Carrier air conditioning jobs in the US is an example. As the leftist Huffington Post raged: "The really scary part is Trump's strongman tactic provides hundreds of families with more than Democrats have offered them in decades".
Indeed, like President Teddy Roosevelt 100 years ago, there is a good deal of the Democrat in this Republican president. Rather like Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal, 75 years ago, a comparatively small initiative, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and a few other such projects, generated the myth, helped by a sympathetic media, that FDR's social engineering ended the Great Depression when a closer examination of the facts shows that the real reasons was meeting the demands of World War II. This did the heavy lifting in bringing about US prosperity 80 years ago. But with mini-gestures in FDR's case and micro gestures in Trump's, may well give new hope to productive men who are feeling beaten down and hopeless.
It now appears that Trump will look for the eye-catching opportunities to make a splash like the consummate showman he his. There are many smelly things in trade deals that can be attacked without undermining the substance of the general accords.
For example, is there there any logical reason why the same pill in the same box with the same brand sells for many times less in Canada than it does in the US? Both Democrats and Republicans appear to have been paid off by the pharmaceutical lobby to achieve this deplorable outcome.
That's why this smelly trade barrier survives, which ever party is in office. But Mr Trump used his own money to get into office and owes the pharma lobby and every other special interest group nothing. Just think how popular it would be to an aging population to cut American pill prices in half as a trade measure. One of which does no harm.
But one can still imagine the Trump administration "getting tough on China" over the blockage of distillers' grain imports, One an imagine a noisy pillow fight, which ends in a US victory, which the Chinese won't mind because everything else will be left alone.
In terms of deeds, one might well expect Mr Trump to be a more ordinary president in terms of concrete activities than widely imagined. But at the same time, he may have turned the corner for his country without affecting the fortunes of China. What he told Jewish Republicans, he might well tell the Chinese: "Like you people, I am a negotiator."
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