We Will be living in Trumpland for decades

The protectionism that Trump brought back into fashion now has a momentum of its own.

- Janan Ganesh

The paragraph that follows is the most reluctantly written of my career.

Donald Trump qualifies as a titanic success in politics. And not because he got himself elected to the world's highest office. Someone does that every leap year. It is because he achieved the hardest thing in government, which is to bind one's successors.

He moved the consensus on a big issue - trade - until the next president couldn't go back, or didn't want to. Hence the tariffs and subsidies of Bidenomics. Hence the spread of protectionism elsewhere in the world. Most leaders who change the "common sense of the age" need consecutive terms (Reagan) or a crisis (Thatcher) or both (FDR). Trump needed neither to turn an apostasy into an orthodoxy.

Whatever happens this week, we will be living in Trumpland for decades. Yes, I'll manage, thanks. Besides some marginal trimming of restaurant wine lists, it is odd how little an era of global economic fragmentation incommodes a man. But "we" also encompasses the unknown millions who won't now be elevated out of low income through trade, as so many Chinese were in the decades either side of the millennium.