Comment by dragonwriter

Free trade is not hurting the economy. American domestic policy impacting the distribution of the produce of the economy is, even in times of strong aggregate economic performance, hurting the felt effects of the economy on large swathes of the population, but throwing up protectionist policies that collapse both the global and local production possibilities curves doesn't help that; it just shrinks the pie without doing anything to deal with the bad distribution which makes people feel like the pie is shrinking even when it is growing. The results you can expect from that should be obvious without experiencing them, but it looks like we are all going to learn about them through painful experience real soon now.