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I take every item in any political agenda at face value and evaluate it objectively. Some of Trump’s ideas were outstanding. His stance on immigration, for example, set him apart from every jackass in the ranks of the GOP leadership in my lifetime.

I found some elements of his agenda to be questionable at best and destructive at worst. I’m a big fan of fixed tariffs imposed uniformly on all products imported from any given country. But imposing tariffs on a commodity-by-commodity basis never struck me as a good idea.

Trump's fixation on protecting the U.S. steel industry, for example, was baffling to me. It was great in theory but terrible in practice. It probably cost him tens of thousands of votes in key Rust Belt states. A few months ago I came across a labor report with a bunch of statistics by industry. It said there were fewer than 85,000 steelworkers in the U.S. as of 2018 or 2019. Protecting the jobs of such a small cohort of voters never made any sense to me, when you consider that for every steelworker in the U.S. there are probably 15-20 people employed in OTHER industries that rely on steel in their manufacturing processes and were seriously disrupted by the rising cost of steel. At least one major Japanese auto manufacturer (Mazda, I think) shelved their plan to build a new plant in the U.S. due to their rising cost projections for domestic materials.

But hey — what do I know?