Like most everything else Trump says, his foreign policy works almost like a Rorschach test where you can read into it whatever you like. Pro-Israel Republican orthodoxy or more pro-Palestinian than Obama. Isolationist or interventionist. For the war in Iraq in 2003 but then trying to rewrite history to say he wasn't. Looking to retrench or on the warpath with China. It goes on.

Yeah, I'm sure he would appoint people at State and at Defence who did have a coherent vision, but for them to be successful he'd still need to support and reinforce their messages. Have you noticed Trump being any good at following his advisers' and campaign managers' strategic lines so far in this campaign? I sure haven't.

I'm aware of those problems - nowhere in the West have the last two or three decades been all that great for the relatively low-skilled workers. But you can't blame all that on free trade. Not to go all Piketty on you, but I'm sure you're familiar with the numbers of how management remuneration as a share of company expenses, and as a multiple of low-level staff wages, has exploded over the decades.

Actually, it betrays an economist's approach to the issue - if free trade is beneficial to the economy as a whole, which it is, but ends up being blocked by those it disadvantages, then there has to be a way for the 'winners' to compensate the losers sufficiently for them to accept it, while still leaving the winners better off than they were. And I assume you're aware that the NRA and millions of your fellow Trump voters do constantly use that 'guns don't kill people, people do' line, even if you don't.

Good that you mention licensed professional services, because that ties neatly into a second problem in the American and to a lesser extent other Western economies: rent-seeking. Such as bogus licensing requirements in professions that don't remotely require it, just to protect insiders' incomes and keep newcomers out. Or big companies lobbying for thousands upon thousands of obscure tax benefits that regular small companies can never access in the same way.

Retraining is simply part of the new reality, and will be so even if you do turn protectionist. In a time where some of the world's biggest and most influential companies operate in fields that didn't even exist fifteen to twenty years ago, it should be clear that the old system of studying/training a few years and using that for the rest of your career is dead and buried. Your air-conditioner worker can lose his job as easily to a robot as to the Chinese.

Of course you need more effort into STEM, better education, continued support for research. But saving jobs artificially through protectionism doesn't help America as a whole.

Agreed that it's not either/or, but much like in his foreign policy, Trump is a fool if he believes that he can just walk in and get a deal improving the American position on all points. If he starts with tariffs to protect certain industries, he can be very sure that there will be retaliations, costing other Americans their jobs. As I recall, George W tried that a few times with the Europeans, who then went out of their way to pick industries predominantly present in swing states to put retaliatory tariffs on.