Trade Bureaucrats: Who Needs Them?

Tonelson has a few vignettes of 'trade negotiations' in the Bad Old Days of Bush, Carter, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.  They are clear:  the old-world negotiators employed by those Administrations were twerps and twits, albeit with lots of fancy college degrees.  And they gave away US jobs and dollars like they were spreading candy at a Christmas parade.

In short, they were idiots, if not trade-traitors.

In contrast, there is Trump.

...Take Elena Bryan. According to this 17-year veteran of trade negotiations with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), “it’s very hard to enforce anything under the Chinese because their system is both complicated and relatively opaque, and there aren’t that many Mandarin speakers around that have the requisite technical trade and legal skills.”

But with its new tariff hike threat (which has the Chinese scurrying back to Washington to try to restart talks), the Trump administration has just suggested how easily this allegedly formidable challenge can be overcome: Tell the Chinese to get serious – and work with standard English – or they get higher tariffs imposed on their goods heading for the U.S. market that their economy desperately needs to produce adequate growth and employment....

So.  When can we dump those USTR idiots and hire plain-spoken Trump Country hammer-throwers instead?