China, knowing U.S. pressure is coming, has been looking for more U.S. goods to buy, said Bradsher, “but the U.S. is just not that competitive anymore in a lot of products other than oil, food and aircraft. And China is now in the test-flight stage for mass-producing its own jetliners as well.”

So what would a smart American president do? First, he’d sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord. TPP eliminated as many as 18,000 tariffs on U.S. exports with the most dynamic economies in the Pacific and created a 12-nation trading bloc headed by the U.S. and focused on protecting what we do best — high-value-added manufacturing and intellectual property. Alas, Trump tore it up without reading it — one of the stupidest foreign policy acts ever. We Brexited Asia! China was not in TPP. It was a coalition built, in part, to pressure Beijing into fairer market access, by our rules. Trump just gave it up for free.

Once a smart president restored participation in TPP, he’d start secret trade talks with the Chinese — no need for anyone to lose face — and tell Beijing: “Since you like your trade rules so much, we’re going to copy them for your companies operating in America: 25 percent tariffs on your cars, and your tech companies that open here have to joint venture and share intellectual property with a U.S. partner — and store all their data on U.S. servers.”

Having a really tough trade negotiation with China on manufacturing and high technology, but doing it in secret, makes sense to me. Starting a public trade war with our allies over aluminum and steel that raises the costs for our manufacturers, that doesn’t protect our growth industries and that loses allies that we need to deal with China makes absolutely no sense.

But while all of this is necessary, it is not sufficient to maintain the U.S. public’s support for free trade, which seems to be declining in both parties now. We needed to be, and still need to be, much more serious, and generous, about creating “wage insurance” and community reinvestment policies for people and places whose employers are suddenly wiped out by a trade shock. Because this one won’t be the last.

At the same time, we need to be much more serious about using every tool we have — tax incentives, Pell grants, community colleges — to create the conditions for every American to be constantly upgrading skills and for every company to keep training its workers. That will matter whether the challenge is China or robots.

Too much of the economic discussion of late “has been focused on the 1 percent versus the 99 percent,” observed Autor. “It’s become a kind of ‘inequality porn’ — where you get so focused on those two numbers that it becomes demobilizing. You lose sight of the fact that there is a dramatic rise in the economic return to tangibly acquiring skills — skills that are available and should be within everyone’s reach.”