[Buckeye McFrog]

Your post is confusing to me

Let me 'splain it to you.

Starting with Reagan the US pursued a course of free trade. Jobs started moving offshore to China and other third-world countries, and the finished goods were being imported back cheaply.

This accelerated under Bush and ever since. People in Rust Belt communities whose communities were being devastated were told that this was temporary pain for long-term gain....sure, it sucks now, but in the long run it will all be better, you'll see.

But it never got any better. And eventually the contagion spread to the South, which by 2016 joined up with the Rust Belt to topple the existing establishment. Trump's economic nationalism is now du rigeur.

Democrats used to talk a good game about changing this, but they never did. Pent-up demand to shift out of that economic course has been building for decades. I have lived in Flint, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, and saw it building first-hand.

[Trump.Deplorable]

Because

“Above all else the 2016 election was a rejection of Chicago School/Milton Friedman/Lassez-Faire economics.”

has absolutely nothing to do with what you just wrote.

Milton Friedman advocated a welfare to work encouragement, elimination of public housing, smaller government, less regulations, free trade (but it has to be both ways, China did not do that), controlled debt (elimination would be best), freedom to build, create, exploit the markets, etc

None of that happened, we never had “free trade” in the sense Milton Friedman advocated. So I can’t see how the past 30 years are at fault when nobody followed anything the man said.