After one month on the campaign trail - Donald Trump is still leading the Republican field according to recent polls.
The media has spent most of the last month fanning the flames around Trump's inflammatory statements about immigration. And this weekend he conquered the headlines by saying that he likes "people who weren't captured" while talking about John McCain's service record.
What the media is missing - but the American middle class is hearing loud and clear - is Trump's message on trade.
The fact that Trump is leading the Republican field shouldn't come as a surprise; at least not to any one old enough to recall Ross Perot's run for president in 1992.
Ross Perot is a billionaire who ran a campaign on the idea that his savvy in business would give him the necessary chops to run the country and to grow the economy. Sound familiar?
It should. Because it's the Donald's MO too. And that's no laughing matter. Ross Perot won 20% of the vote in the 1992 election by running as a single-issue third party candidate.
So it shouldn't be any surprise that Trump, an outsider billionaire with no political experience and a campaign based more on insults than policy, is leading the Republican polls.
It's not just name recognition. And it's not just novelty. It's the fact that he's talking about TRADE. He calls our leaders "stupid," and our trade policies "insane." And his message rings loud and clear.
At least to anyone who lived through the last 35 years of disastrous so-called "free trade" policies carried out by Reagan, Clinton, two generations of Bushes, and Barack Obama.
To give you an idea of how damaging our trade policies have been: Senator Bernie Sanders talks about the fact that our trade policies have contributed to the loss of more than 60,000 American factories over just the last FIFTEEN years.
Before Reagan took office, we were the world's largest importer of raw materials and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods.
We were the world's largest creditor, and through the Export-Import Bank we even managed to loan money to other countries so that they could afford to buy our American made goods.
We were running a trade surplus. And we had been running one for most of the 200 years prior, dating back to George Washington's presidency. And then Reagan took office and led America into an era of fevered "free-trade." One that continued through the next five administrations through to today.
