At a Thursday morning Cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump bid farewell to Gary Cohn, his outgoing National Economic Council director, whom he described as “a globalist.”
He’s “been terrific,” Trump said. “He may be a globalist, but I still like him. He is seriously a globalist, there’s no question. But you know what, in his own way he’s a nationalist because he loves our country.”
Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the Trump administration’s most senior economic policy officials, struck a similar note in his own farewell note about Cohn, saying he “never expected that the coworker I would work closest, and best, with at the White House would be a ‘globalist.’”
.@MickMulvaneyOMB's statement on the departure of Gary Cohn. pic.twitter.com/PgpOH6rcdE
— OMB Press (@OMBPress) March 6, 2018
To many people, this term is simply baffling and unfamiliar. But to many observers, it smacks vaguely of anti-Semitism. Its origin lies in a now-obsolete factional conflict between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. But it also refers to a very real policy debate that is currently roiling the GOP over how to think about trade policy.
Trump is levying taxes on imported steel and aluminum at the same moment he needs to refill the depleted ranks of the White House senior staff. The question of whether he’ll hire more “globalists” like Cohn or “nationalists” like trade adviser Peter Navarro will determine the future of the Trump administration’s trade policy, with potentially major implications for the American economy.
Republicans disagree about trade
Trump campaigned on a staunch protectionist platform. He promised to cancel the Trans-Pacific Partnership, tear up NAFTA, label China a currency manipulator, and encourage Congress to pass an End the Offshoring Act that “Establishes tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free.”
Then upon taking office, Trump quickly staffed the main economic policy jobs in his administration with conventional business-friendly Republicans.
But while Trump has been all over the map on most policy issues over the years, skepticism about the merits of international trade has been a major throughline in his thinking. And Trump-style protectionists were scattered throughout his team, including Bannon as chief strategist, Navarro heading up an amorphous trade council, and Wilbur Ross as commerce secretary. What’s more, rank-and-file Republicans appear to share Trump’s skeptical view of trade.
It was Bannon who seems to have first popularized the “globalist” label as a term for his factional enemies, seeking to leverage Trump’s protectionist instincts to win a larger set of power struggles. But after Bannon’s ouster last summer, the policy situation seemed to have actually stabilized:
- TPP was canceled, Trump was not going to do any new trade deals, and a slow-running NAFTA renegotiation process was underway, likely resulting in modest changes.
- Trump would continue to sporadically tweet protectionist rhetoric but not actually do anything dramatic on trade policy.
- Affirmative “nationalist” policymaking would largely take place in the immigration sphere, where the White House was pushing a multifaceted crackdown that congressional Republicans largely supported.
That stable dynamic has now broken down, with Trump’s surprise embrace of steel tariffs throwing much into question about the future of American trade policy. With Cohn stepping down, the revival of “globalist” as a term of derision against him raises the prospect that Trump intends to fill vacancies with “nationalists” and take a more protectionist tilt from here on out. But it also raises questions about his administration’s tendency to wink at extremists and its somewhat inexplicable habit of flirting with anti-Semitism.
“Globalists” as dog whistle
Many argue that the invocation of the term “globalist” carries an undertone of anti-Semitism for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it was originally deployed by Bannon, who has a much larger record of dabbling in anti-Semitism.
In general, the idea that Jews in particular are not loyal citizens is a longtime anti-Semitic trope. And it seems noteworthy that in the initial round of globalist versus nationalist arguments, Bannon’s main antagonists — not just Cohn but also Kushner and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin — were mostly Jewish.
That being said, in defense of the anti-globalists, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is also Jewish, and as an anti-immigration zealot, he’s never been tarred with the “globalist” line.
What’s clear is that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise in the Trump era and Trump has something to do with that (Jonathan Weisman’s new book, (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump, explores this in detail). That’s a lens through which the “globalist” issue is seen.
But it’s important to be clear that there is a real policy dispute here.
The parties have changed views on trade and could again
From its inception in the 1850s through to World War II, the Republican Party was a high-tariff, protectionist party. The Democrats, meanwhile, were not against selective acts of protection for industries from areas they represented but generally stood for low tariffs and free trade.
That began to switch in the 1960s and especially 1970s, as a result of shifts in the global economy that made American business more favorable to trade and American labor unions less favorable (for a detailed account, read David Karol’s Party Position Change in American Politics). Over the past generation, congressional Republicans have been clearly more favorable to trade than congressional Democrats, though presidents of both parties have been favorable to trade.
There are some important signs that the parties could be ripe for another change of stance. Some of this is driven by Trump personally. But it is also true that public opinion began to show a partisan split on trade before Trump won the nomination, with Republicans displaying more skepticism toward TPP in polls even as they showed more enthusiasm on Capitol Hill.
It’s also the case that Mulvaney and other members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus split with their party’s leadership to vote against granting the Obama administration trade promotion authority. At the same time, underlying shifts in the economy have again shifted the interest group politics — these days, manufacturing workers are a small share of overall US union membership, so the original impetus for the Democratic tilt against trade is going away.
All of which is to say that not only is Trump somewhat idiosyncratically hostile to trade, but there are at least some deep structural forces indicating that Trump has the “right” stance for a conservative Republican on this and trade-friendly GOP congressional leaders have the “wrong” one. This makes the question of whether the administration will be staffed with people who agree with the congressional leadership’s instincts or people who agree with Trump’s instincts fairly high-stakes.
The decision to label Cohn a “globalist” on his way out the door is, at a minimum, a suggestion that he lost not a specific policy argument about steel but a much larger argument about the overall direction of the Republican Party.