LORI WALLACH, via Chris Tebsherany, ctebsherany [at] citizen.org, @PCGTW
    Wallach is director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

She just wrote the piece “Latest TPP Peril: President Donald Trump,” which states: “The election of Donald Trump did not kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP never had sufficient support in the House of Representatives to be passed following its February 2016 signing. And years of campaigning in the TPP nations against the TPP’s expansion of corporate power by an international coalition of working people, environmentalists, consumer and health advocates and more nations is why no deal on the pact could be reached for years after its planned deadline.

“But the Obama administration’s relentless push for the TPP did help elect Trump. Even if the TPP never goes into effect, its damage will be felt worldwide — in the form of the election of President Donald Trump. Yes, many factors contributed to this outcome. But it was not all racists and other haters who elected Trump. It was also a lot of working class voters who supported President Barack Obama twice. Hillary Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters.

“Did we have to get to this to end the era of smug Democratic and Republican political elites scoffing at the notion that trade is a salient political issue — and relentlessly pushing more of the same policies to the detriment of a voting bloc otherwise known as a majority of our fellow Americans?”