Donald Trump’s announcement today that the US will withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership builds on the protectionist rhetoric of his inaugural address. This was some red meat for the Trump base, following a weekend of scrapes over numbers.

While we should neither mourn the demise of the TPP nor celebrate the faux-populism that Trump is now staging, it is a good time to take stock of the balance of political forces and think about what kind of strategy we need to defeat Trump going forward.

In the heyday of New Deal liberalism, Democrats made bread-and-butter issues their bread and butter; they expressly constructed state policies around various kinds of worker protections. Since the neoliberal turn of the Clinton years, however, many Democrats have reflexively favored free-trade arrangements, no matter their effect on workers.