This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 6, 2004. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's harder than you might think to draw big distinctions between the trade policies of Donald Trump and

Joe Biden.

And that's decidedly not good news for free and open exchange with our fellows around the

world.

Heato Scott Linscomb handicaps the trade policies of the two leading candidates for

president. Scott I don't know if you're old enough to remember this but I certainly do

President Obama, making his pretty weak calculated defense of trade as, yeah, we kind of

of gotta do it it and it was not a look at what greatness trade

unleashes for humanity on the planet,

certainly not what it does for Americans

who are so productive in creating products

for the world, designing products for the world.

Donald Trump, just a few years later, was threatening companies for moving production to Mexico,

the thought NAFTA was terrible,

and then signed into law a deal that was most of NAFTA, I suppose, with some pointed changes.

And Joe Biden, tell me if I'm wrong, seems relatively silent on the trade issue but largely hasn't done anything

to counter any of the policies of the Trump administration. Is that about right?

Yeah I think that's about right. The Biden administration and rhetoric is pretty much a

polite version of Donald Trump, which in fact Jim Baucus, one of our adjunct

scholars at Cato, wrote exactly that, that the Biden administration is the

era of polite protectionism, he called it, maintaining most of Trump's policies, but also refusing

...