Donald Trump is illustrating the wrong way. He criticizes the North American Free Trade Agreement, permanent normalization of trade relations with China and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership because — he claims — they were badly negotiated. Trump is half right. If the point of trade agreements is to create jobs and prosperity, then the deals the United States has entered into in recent years were terribly negotiated. But Trump's argument is based on the flawed assumption that all trade negotiators are bumblers. The reality is that, while some backers of these deals may have bought into the notion that they were intended to create employment with good wages, the problem with so-called "free trade" agreements has always been that the first priority of negotiators was to make wealthy investors (such as Trump) wealthier by allowing multinational corporations to engage in a race to the bottom when it comes to wages, regulations and environmental protections.