Over the past decade or so, the Green New Deal became a useful punching bag for the Republican Party. This policy agenda, associated with progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was much caricatured as a sure path to a bleak future in which government bureaucrats force you to give up your car and drink out of soggy paper straws. But given their flailing effort to restructure global trade and revive American manufacturing—and the dire consequence it is having on their popularity—President Trump and his allies might benefit from looking more closely at the their opponents’ much-derided climate plan, because they are currently making all of the potentially fatal mistakes it was designed to avoid.
The Trump administration’s goal of bringing about a durable, wholesale political transformation of the global economic order seems to be stalling. Polls consistently show a growing majority of the public opposes Trump’s tariffs, believes they are making them worse off, fears they will raise prices and hurt the economy more broadly, and wants Congress to block them. The chaotic rollout of Trump’s trade agenda is not just handing him the worst approval ratings he’s ever had on the economy—after eight years in which it was his consistent strong suit—but has dragged his approval among independent voters down to historic lows for any president.