When the president did take a bold stand, it sometimes came at the expense of those same working Americans. I am referring to the 2015 debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, which aimed to extend the NAFTA pattern to many countries on the Pacific Rim. Predictably, the phrase “no-brainer” made its appearance again, most notably from the pencil of an economist who thought the question before us was not the treaty’s particulars but whether trade was a good thing. Obama himself, having spun a full one-eighty since his days criticizing NAFTA, accused the treaty’s opponents of stupidly
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