Trump has one last remaining lifeline. Biden is moving to sever it.

Op-ed by Greg Sargent @ WashingtonPost.com, Sept. 9

A new poll from NBC News and Marist College finds Joe Biden leading President Trump by nine points in the crucial state of Pennsylvania, 53 percent to 44 percent. But it also finds Trump leading by 10 points on who will best handle the economy, 51 percent to 41 percent.

Which points to a crucial 2020 dynamic: If anything is still keeping Trump within range of winning through a real comeback, a major polling error or outright cheating, it’s his lingering advantage on the economy.

Can the former vice president eliminate or neutralize that advantage?

Biden is set to roll out a new economic agenda designed to do just this. It should also prompt a reconsideration of another big question: how vulnerable Trump has made himself by thoroughly selling out on the “populist economic nationalism” he ran on in 2016.

The new Biden policies have their own economic nationalist bent: one is a 10 percent penalty surtax on any products manufactured overseas for sales back in the United States. Another is a tax credit for companies that invest in creating jobs here by, say, revitalizing a closed facility or moving jobs back home.

All this comes after Biden recently rolled out a plan for hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in rebuilding U.S. manufacturing and supply chains exposed as vulnerable by the coronavirus pandemic.

I want to focus less on the policy details than on the broader story Biden is telling.

Trump’s great betrayal

Trump ran in 2016 as a different kind of Republican who would use the power of government to protect people vulnerable to the degradations of unchecked global capitalism. Once in office, Trump either entirely abandoned that promise (embracing GOP plutocracy via a massive corporate tax cut and a drive to repeal health coverage for millions) or made a hash of it through destructive, impulsive incompetence (his disastrous trade wars).

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