The Lawyer’s Theory of Trade

“Yeah. I think we’ve been wildly successful.”

That’s a quote from Jamieson Greer, Donald Trump’s trade representative, speaking recently on The Daily.

It’s worth giving that episode a full listen, because Greer isn’t some random spokesperson sent out to read a talking point. He is — by all accounts — one of the central architects of Trump’s tariff agenda. Maybe the central architect.

I want to use this interview for what it’s good for: understanding the person at the center of America’s trade war, and the worldview behind it. Having gone through it closely, I came to understand both a lot better.

Here’s what struck me. Greer is a lawyer, not an economist. And I mean that as a description, not an insult. He’s got a coherent worldview, and he can argue it hard. But time after time, that worldview rests on muddled thinking about what trade is, who benefits, and what problem the policy is even trying to solve.

Big idea #1: Trade enlarges the pie

The first thing that stood out to me in this interview is that Greer talks about trade the way other people talk about war:

“If China is not going to change its practices that we believe are harmful, then we have to take unilateral measures. We have to be policymakers, otherwise we just have to accept all these giant surpluses that they’re developing through their own policies. And I’m not going to take that. The president doesn’t want to take that, because he’s not just going to take other countries’ policies and say, oh, well, OK, I guess we’ll just hand over our industrial base to everybody else. I guess everyone else will just have subsidies, and we’ll lay down and take it on the chin again.”

I get why this lands. Some governments really do tilt the playing field. And supply-chain dependence can be a national security problem.

But Greer takes those partial truths and turns them into a universal frame: If they make more, we must be making less. If they export more, we must be losing. If we import more, we must be surrendering.

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