Policy advisor Mark DiPlacido speaks with the Boston Globe

President Trump’s trade war has not gone well.

The markets have rebelled. His favorability ratings have tumbled.

Even some Republicans have voiced their displeasure. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas recently warned that the GOP could face a “bloodbath” in the midterm elections if the country sinks into a recession.

It’s enough to make you wonder: How long can this tariff thing last?

…

Who will argue, then, for the Trump tariffs?

Recently, I spoke with Mark DiPlacido, who worked in the office of US trade representative Robert Lighthizer in the first Trump administration, and is now with American Compass, a leading think tank on the populist right. And he was pleased with what he’s seeing.

“The president,” DiPlacido said, “is really resetting the whole paradigm of US trade.”

He pointed out that America has a trade deficit of nearly $1 trillion, meaning it imports almost $1 trillion more in goods and services than it exports.

…

But DiPlacido says that too much of that “investment” is just a snatching up of American wealth — and that not enough of the money that flows back into the country is filtering down to working people.

The only way to confront this problem is to build more stuff, he says.

And even if factories don’t employ the same number of people they once did, they can still be important anchors for local economies, DiPlacido adds. Wouldn’t you rather have a factory with relatively few employees in your town than no factory at all? And wouldn’t you like to keep the industrial process close so we can learn from it? So we can innovate? So we can develop new products?