President Donald Trump has once again undercut a member of his own administration in a particularly humiliating fashion. This time the victim was his Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.
According to a Politico report on Tuesday:
Trump himself has lashed out at Ross in Oval Office meetings, telling the man who once helped bail him out in Atlantic City that he’s “past his prime” and “no longer a killer” and trying to bench him from making trade deals, according to three people familiar with the comments. Despite being one of the administration’s leading protectionist voices early on, Ross was initially left off a May trade delegation to China led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
But now Ross is heading back to China in early June in hope of cutting some type of trade deal that delivers on Trump’s campaign promises to extract concessions from Beijing on behalf of American workers.
The report cited a number of reasons for the diminution in Ross' influence.
Although Ross had originally hoped to take the lead among administration officials on trade issues — a logical assumption given both his high-ranking cabinet post and the fact that, like Trump, Ross has been a longstanding critic of free trade policies — he was soon outpaced by Robert Lighthizer, Trump's choice for U.S. Trade Representative. Not only did Lighthizer effectively circumvent Ross when it came to trade issues, but Ross also hurt his own standing with the president after he attempted to bring back two deals with China. One of those deals would have cut Chinese steel production and the other would have permitted Chinese cooked chicken to be imported to the United States in return for China importing America beef.
While Ross was proud of these achievements, Trump viewed them as nowhere near big enough, prompting him to humiliate Ross in front of other administration officials and informing Ross that he no longer wished for him to be involved in trade negotiations.
If this sounds familiar, that's because Trump has done this to previous cabinet officials.
In October, Trump tweeted insults directed at Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over his stated desire to negotiate with North Korea (something Trump himself is currently in the process of trying to do).
"I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man... Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done! Being nice to Rocket Man hasn't worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won't fail," Trump tweeted.
Trump has also lashed out at Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, blaming her for his ongoing failure to curb undocumented immigration into the United States. The rant prompted Nielsen to draft a resignation letter, although she later decided not to submit it.
Perhaps most famously, Trump turned on a man who had once been one of his close friends, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The bad blood between the two men arose after Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation due to his own previously undisclosed contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. In front of other members of his administration, Trump questioned Sessions' loyalty and accused him of both being weak and opening the administration up to the subsequent investigation from the newly-appointed special counsel. As The New York Times later reported:
Ashen and emotional, Mr. Sessions told the president he would quit and sent a resignation letter to the White House, according to four people who were told details of the meeting. Mr. Sessions would later tell associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.
Trump's public falling out with Ross, however, could have major consequences for the American economy. After more than 80 years of free trade economic policies, Trump is the first president to make open attempts to push America toward a more protectionist stance.
"Let me just say, from a policy and strategic standpoint, I think the president has it all wrong," Ed Gerwin of the Progressive Policy Institute told Salon last month:
He has this kind of very, in my mind, basic view that you can use tariffs to compel China to change their behavior. The problem is, there are legitimate concerns that we in the United States have about China's behavior, but most of those have to do with the unfair practices that China has engaged in with respect to trying to seize the industries of the future: Making it harder for American companies to sell high technology products in China, acquiring American technology through acquisitions in illegal means. Those are the kinds of things that are very troublesome with respect to China. And I don't really think that the president fully grasps that threat and instead is using tactics that, in my mind, are much more suited to the 1920s or 1930s, and they didn't even work back then.
Ross himself seemed to share this view, telling reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland back in January that "there have always been trade wars. The difference now is U.S. troops are now coming to the ramparts." He later added, "Trade wars are fought every single day. Unfortunately, every single day there are various parties violating the rules and taking advantage."
Prior to Trump, the last president to be unequivocally protectionist was Herbert Hoover, the man who governed America before Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency and the New Deal transformed how the federal government is expected to oversee the economy. Despite running a very controversial campaign in 2016, Trump's anti-trade rhetoric was one of the few issues that united Americans across ideological and other demographic lines, a fact that he used to justify hiring anti-trade policy advisers to important economic positions. Considering that the commerce secretary is traditionally one of the most powerful individuals in that group (if not the most powerful), it remains to be seen whether Trump's sidelining of Ross will hinder his ability to achieve one of his signature policy goals — that is, fixing trade agreements that he has regularly characterized as faulty.
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