What To Expect from the Trump Administration on Forced Labor & Trade
And what to hope for.
The thing I most remember about the sprinters from Middletown, Ohio was the sorry state of their track uniforms. It’s an odd memory, for sure. But the old, whiteish singlets that had clearly been used and reused year after year were noteworthy to me. Maybe they stuck out because they had no fancy logoed school tracksuits for warmups, no matching spike bags, or accompanying swag. Or maybe I just noticed because they were so blazing fast, they booked a trip to state instead of us.
My home track was barely 13 miles from Middletown as the crow flies, but it might have been a world away: we in Centerville with our multiple complimentary Nike-sponsored kits; they in Middletown with I’m not sure what. AK Steel? The following year, after I enrolled at Miami University to study philosophy, I got to see that soot-spewing plant a lot more closely, each time we drove from home to campus or back.
Why my town flourished as it did, when Middletown most certainly did not, was a mystery to me. If you’d asked me at the time, I probably would have pointed to the differences in where our parents worked. It seemed that almost everyone in our community had a dad or mom who was a doctor, lawyer, or accountant, and most seemed to have really good jobs, often for big companies. Did minivan-driving families in Middletown have moms and dads who worked at AK Steel? This was hard for me to imagine, but also impossible for me to know. I knew my community lived with abundance. If I’m honest, I preferred to avoid even refueling in Middletown.
Years later, I came to better understand the biographic, sociologic, economic and historic factors that produced such disparate results across our neighboring communities. The economic benefits we’d enjoyed in my town were broadly attributable to having dads and moms who were knowledge workers for profitable companies. In turn, those companies could attribute much of their success to technological innovation and trade liberalization of the preceding 20 years.
Down in Middletown, the story was different. Yes, AK Steel was important. But frankly, there just weren’t all that many minivan-driving families with both moms and dads. To the extent technological innovation had an impact, it threatened to displace steady good-paying jobs. Benefits from so-called trade liberalization were nowhere to be found.
While I assembled some of this understanding through graduate studies in economics and international trade, Hillbilly Elegy really made it hit home for me. J.D. Vance’s pre-2016 election autobiography of growing up in Middletown, Ohio offered many readers (especially in my socioeconomic class) a sense of epiphany about this swath of the electorate that we did not know. But for me, there was an added personal dimension. I’d raced those Middletown boys in their ratty jerseys.
Everyone had their own unique response to the shock of the 2016 election. Some grieved, some protested, some celebrated. While I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, my first impulse in the weeks after the election was to nose my way into a public forum where I would try and make too many points in 650 words. (Shocking, I know.)
My first op-ed was published in the Cincinnati Enquirer. It was not a paid opinion, nor was it #SponsoredContent. It was simply an effort to validate what I observed as the most legitimate grievance animating Trump supporters: a rational and well-founded disapprobation of globalism, which had benefitted them hardly at all. I also felt duty-bound to try and explain that attempting to reorganize global trade through tariffs was almost certain to backfire. I even had a graph! I’m not sure I can fully account for why I wanted to write that essay, other than an in-my-bones conviction about the importance of being responsive to the results of a democratic process.
Now, eight years on and in the wake of comparably shocking election results, folks are again sorting through their own unique responses. Some blame, some cynicism, some genuine hope. Within the commentariat, John Harris has once again advanced (to my mind) a highly compelling take. You should read his full essay, but I think his most inarguable conclusion is that the Trump movement—no matter how much this appalls its (particularly college-educated) opponents—is a powerful expression of democracy. It also happens to be a more multi-ethnic and multi-racial expression than just about anyone anticipated.
In 2024, I understand the Trump movement in this way. And yet again, I feel as duty-bound as ever to try be responsive to this remarkable democratic outcome. What exactly is it about international trade—a core theme of the election—that contributed to galvanizing this unprecedented democratic coalition? What might it take to deliver on their expectations? One could ask the same question about immigration, of course, or the domestic economy, or U.S. foreign policy, or the social demands of the cultural elite. But this is a newsletter about trade. And forced labor.
To the extent the average, normie voter thinks about international trade—and admittedly, most folks think about it very little—they do so on two fronts. One, they think about what trade means for their job. And two, they relate it to their sense of unease about all the stuff they can buy.
Examples of the first front are easy to imagine. If you’re a farmer, you probably know that trade is important for your crops to fetch a good price. So too if you’re an upper-middle class Centerviller (Centervillain?). When you have a good job for a big company, you probably intuit that when your employer benefits from international trade, you will as well. If you’re a working class Middletowner (Middletownie?), you might think international trade is irrelevant (if you work a service-sector job) or a direct threat (if you in manufacturing).
These inferences are correct in some instances, and incorrect others. But overwhelmingly, the political discourse of international trade focuses on this front. “Tariffs are a tax increase that will drive inflation, ruin the economy and destroy jobs!” “Tariffs will Make America Great Again!” Historically speaking, trade has long been viewed through this lens of tariffs and jobs. During the height of the Bush & Obama FTA era, when MFN rates were already low across the board, trade agreements (and public discourse) focused on other less politically salient topics, like investor rights and cross-border regulatory harmonization. This Trump-era resumption of a totalizing discourse around tariffs and jobs is therefore less an aberration, and more a reversion to norm.
But what is lost in that discourse is the second juncture between the average citizen and international trade—a juncture that is at once more ubiquitous and more monolithic. The absolute number one way that the average person encounters international trade is through the goods they consume.
Advocates of free trade love to tout that 97% of the world’s consumers live outside of the United States. But of course, something like the converse is also true. The percentage of goods consumed in the U.S. that are 100% domestically-produced (from 100% domestic content) is quite small. Some of the electorate will be impacted by global trade in the context of their job. But for the entire electorate, the most direct connection we will have to global trade is through what we buy.
The sneaking suspicion of many is that a lot of what we buy—or at least, a lot of what is on offer for purchase—is bad, in one way or another. Maybe it’s bad for our bodies, or bad for the environment. Who would be surprised to find that ultra low-cost goods are bad for the people who made them? Is the average American voter shocked to find that consumer goods are linked to slave labor? Or do they just think, “yeah, that checks out.”
And thus, dear reader, I have reached the thesis of this essay. I suspect that it’s only a matter of time, and perhaps a catalyst or two in the form of significant news breaking or history unfolding, before this issue is seized upon by the Trump administration in a way that no one has yet seen (or possibly imagined).
I expect this not just because China seems particularly committed to its programs of forced labor, and also not just because this is something of a “horseshoe issue” where far right and left are more closely aligned than the center left and right (and the so-called far right is coming to power). I expect the Trump administration to seize upon the issue of forced labor because the topic touches a nerve so very similar to the issues already animating the Trump / MAGA / America First movement.
The movement is marked by nothing if not hostile denunciation of the voices of institutional authority (no matter the source) that are most likely to pull a Chico Marx, in response to any number of legitimate grievances: “who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” The MAGA movement rejected such institutional narratives from the cultural elite around the state of the southern border, the propriety of boys competing in girls high school sports, and the irreplaceable quality of Red 40, just to name a few diverse issues. Is it so hard to imagine the issue of supply chain forced labor connecting on the same frequency?
Like those issues, this is not just a grievance to exploit, it’s also a problem in need of leadership to resolve. In my estimation, the issue is long overdue for a reckoning. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the issue of forced labor was not tackled during 70 years of expansion in the system of global trade. Is the most egregious oversight of postwar global trade consensus the failure to cultivate any approbation toward trade in slave-made goods? Is the correct policy prescription a series of stronger national borders, where rules-based mechanisms ensure fairness and predictability in the work of preventing inadvertent consumption of slave-made goods? One could make the case.
If this should come to pass as I foresee it, I do harbor some concerns. I mean, what could go wrong? But I’d like to address those concerns by articulating not only what I expect from the Trump administration on this issue, but also what I hope for. Specifically, I hope for intelligent and thoughtful leadership, rooted in wisdom. If for whatever reason that proves too tall an order, I’ll settle for political leadership which understands that tariffs and forced labor enforcement are two completely different animals.
There are many rationales for tariffs: to develop leverage in bilateral trade negotiations, to rectify a trade imbalance, to protect domestic industries, or counteract foreign subsidies or overproduction. But tariffs are always instrumental. Tariffs are never an end in themselves. This is true even for the Tariff Sheriff. You apply tariffs not just to have them, but to Make America Great Again. Tariffs are the chosen tool for that job.
Ending trade in slave-made goods, on the other hand, is intrinsically valuable. You ban trade in slave-made goods, so that you can end trade in slave-made goods. It’s an end in itself. This is critical to remember because there is no greater power play in international trade than the import ban. Banning goods is like imposing a tariff of infinity. If tariffs are your jam, then banning goods will be your narcotic.
To understand that a forced labor trade ban is intrinsically valuable is to grasp that the law can and should only ever impact slave-made goods. To the extent it effects more than that, it’s missed the mark. In theory, you can have enforcement as vigorous as you like, provided it’s specific to content that was in fact produced with forced labor, and provided it unfolds under a transparent, predictable rules-based environment. This is essential if the law is ever to be reasonably expected to incentivize the identification and eradication of forced labor at scale.
Both because I doubt that the U.S. laws banning trade in slave-made goods will fly under the radar for the next four years, and because I don’t think they should, I hope that someone in the Trump administration will step up to offer the wise, intelligent and thoughtful leadership the issue requires.
Who might be up to the task? It’s a politically salient issue of consequence commercially and internationally. While we might get a trade czar in the new administration, that person is likely to have their hands full with the tariff agenda. Forced labor brushes with the traditional jurisdiction of DHS, Commerce, Labor and USTR, but the issue sits in an area substantially outside the scope of any Cabinet member’s direct and exclusive authority. It’s an area of intense interest from members of Congress, the press and foreign governments. For an administration that intends to take the issue seriously, one might conclude it would be an optimal part of the Vice President’s portfolio.
We shall see.