Is Trump more left-wing than Biden?

Just when it seemed that Donald Trump had finally committed political suicide — his notion of injecting disinfectant to cure coronavirus marking only one of his recent reckless absurdities — he says something off the cuff that makes one lament the sight of so much raw political talent going to waste in the cause of solipsistic mania.

A leftist anti-Trumper I may be, but I’ve been strangely impressed by the President’s capacity for perfectly credible, progressive–sounding political analysis, especially on the trade issues that sometimes bring together on common ground right-wing nationalists and left-wing defenders of labour rights. That an estimated eight million Obama voters chose Trump in 2016, and more than 200,000 Bernie Sanders supporters voted for him in the three crucial Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, testifies to his appeal among a portion of the disaffected working class who cannot simply be written off as racist, right-wing or lunatic.

Trump’s latest insights (I use the term ‘insights’ guardedly), mostly unreported in the major media, came in a remarkable hour-long interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox News. As with all Trump’s self-aggrandising rambles on TV, it takes a long time for him to get to the point, if he does ever get there. About ten minutes into the interview, the conversation turned to US trade policy, which Trump and Sanders, as well as the pre-White House and anti-Hillary Obama, agree cost the country millions of factory jobs that moved to Mexico and China. Now, in the age of Covid-19, mass unemployment and emergency medical equipment shortages, the issue of free trade and where goods are made has taken on new urgency.

Trump bit into the subject with characteristic opacity. ‘We used to make our own product,’ he said.