Strip away the jabs at Hillary and Bill Clinton on Tuesday, and there wasn’t much in the opening minutes of Trump’s speech that would be out of place in a graduate seminar in a public policy program. Globalization, it’s widely agreed, creates more wealth, even if distributed unevenly. Congress, for decades, has embraced the wealth-creation parts of trade, leaving grad students to puzzle about how to solve the challenge of who gets what.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, typically a reliable conduit of Republican pro-business positions, sought to counter Trump’s remarks, saying that the benefits of trade greatly outweigh the costs.

“In fact, trade has been a lifeline for many more workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio -- especially in the wake of the recession,” John G. Murphy, the Chamber’s senior vice president for international policy, said Tuesday in a blog post.

In May, when Trump spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Greene, he said his unorthodoxies were like the invention of the paper clip -- obvious ideas, just sitting there waiting for someone to see them, sell them and get rich. At the time, he was referring to his full-throated defense of Social Security. The ravages of globalization may be another such paper clip.

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