Back in February, workers at a Carrier manufacturing plant in Indianapolis were told that the factory, and their 1,400 jobs, were being moved to Mexico.
That story was front-and-center ahead of today's Indiana primary, and it shows how trade has become the big issue of the 2016 election.
On the left, Bernie Sanders took home two of his biggest wins in hard-hit rust belt regions like Michigan and Wisconsin by running on a platform that opposes the Transpacific Partnership and rightly points out that NAFTA, CAFTA, and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China have helped destroy the middle class.
On the other side, Donald Trump has bucked the GOP party line on corporate managed trade deals and won over the blue-collar Republican base.
And like Sanders, Trump has brought in huge numbers of first-time voters and independents on a platform that is almost entirely focused on jobs and trade (even his racist immigrant language has a "jobs" subtext: "They're taking your jobs.").
His opponents have pointed to his stances on Planned Parenthood and transgender bathrooms as proof that Trump is too liberal to lead the Republican party, but he still continues to build support both from within the Republican party and from independents based on his trade/jobs stance.
If someone had told you a year ago that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee, you probably would have thought it was some kind of bad joke.
It seemed much more likely that the nominee would be Jeb Bush or Koch Brother-darling Scott Walker - even Ted Cruz seemed likely based on the fact that he could readily capture the evangelical voting block.
Those candidates made sense because they could use the Republican time-tested formula of mixing fear about terrorists and welfare queens with fervent lip-service to God and the Bible.
But Donald Trump has a new and improved formula to drive voters to the polls.
Trump has pretty much embarrassed himself every time he's tried to pander to evangelicals, from quoting "Two Corinthians" at Liberty University to saying off the cuff that women should be punished for seeking abortions.
But compared to the viral sound-bite slogans that his supporters can shout, like "BUILD THAT WALL!" and "AMERICA FIRST", nothing else he's said has really mattered.
That's because they're not just outrageous slogans that uninformed racists can rally behind, they're slogans that reflect the fact that a lot of Americans feel screwed by our corporate managed trade deals that have destroyed the middle class and sent our factories overseas.
Or as Donald Trump put it in a recent
campaign stop in Indiana: "We can't continue to allow China to rape our country."
What Trump said is undoubtedly crude, but it's how a lot of Americans across large parts of the country honestly feel.
This is really dangerous for the Democrats in November, because Trump's position on trade is something that both the far-right and the progressive left actually agree on.
