It’s become an article of faith for trade hardliners in both parties that a protectionist agenda is a guaranteed pathway to building support among working-class voters. But now that President Donald Trump is testing that theory in practice, it is largely flopping on the campaign trail.
Trump has pursued the most confrontational trade agenda of any president since at least William McKinley at the end of the 19th century, and by the estimation of some historians, even Thomas Jefferson around its beginning.
But even in heavily blue-collar states and House districts that were long believed to
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