Unlikely Allies in the Fight Against Free Trade

They met in the 1990s, at an event about the North American Free Trade Agreement, where they were the only people arguing against it. He was a conservative trade lawyer who filed anti-dumping cases on behalf of American steel companies and predicted that the treaty would hurt American jobs. (It did.) She was a liberal activist with a consumer advocacy organization who planned protests featuring giant puppets. Her worry was that NAFTA’s rules would hurt working people and override U.S. legal standards on food safety and the environment. (They did.)

These two had something else in common: Both had grown up in Midwestern towns that suffered when manufacturing moved overseas. She hailed from Wausau, Wis., where her family had run a scrapyard. He grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, and his father put himself through college by working in a steel mill. After that first meeting, they kept in touch, swapping notes on how to throw sand in the gears of a free trade machine that seemed unstoppable.

Thirty years later, this unlikely friendship — between Bob Lighthizer, Donald Trump’s U.S. trade representative, and Lori Wallach, the director of the ReThink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy group — continues. And it played a role in bringing about one of the biggest shifts in U.S. trade policy in decades: the astonishing reversal of U.S. support for the international trading system that American officials had long championed.

Mr. Lighthizer is best known as the implementer of Mr. Trump’s agenda of economic populism. He renegotiated NAFTA, slapped tariffs on China and put the World Trade Organization’s appeals court on ice by refusing to nominate new judges. What is less well known is that he did all that with the help of Ms. Wallach and other progressive Democrats, who proved to be some of his most reliable allies — over the howling objections of corporate-oriented Republicans. In the acknowledgments of his book “No Trade Is Free,” Mr. Lighthizer singled out Ms. Wallach as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator.”

His policies were hated by Wall Street, but they are popular with many ordinary Americans, which is one reason that the Biden administration has not rolled them back and in some cases has even expanded them. Like Mr. Lighthizer, Mr. Biden’s U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, speaks of trade policies that should be centered on the needs of American workers, not multinational corporations.