Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Trumponomics Won’t Outlive Trump

Republicans will jettison protectionism and contempt for global institutions, though not their hostility to legal immigration.

November 12, 2020 at 2:00 PM UTC

By Michael R. Strain

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

Globalism will be back.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images

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President Donald Trump lost his bid to win re-election, and when he leaves the White House most of the distinctly Trumpian elements of his approach to economic policy will leave with him.

To many Republican politicians, the 2020 election results look like an endorsement of the economic approach of the last four years. Their party gained seats in the House of Representatives, will probably keep control of the Senate and maintained their grip on state legislatures. Trump increased his support among African-American and key Hispanic voters. Trump coasted to victory in states like Texas and Ohio, where pre-election polls showed him struggling, and won about 8 million more votes than in 2016, the latest counts show. (President-elect Joe Biden outpaced Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance by over 10 million votes.)