So when Trump says he wants to force Apple to make its products in America, what he’s really unintentionally saying is that he wants American robots to do the work of Chinese robots. President Trump can raise all the tariff walls he wants — manufacturing jobs lost to Asia aren’t coming back in any sense that Trump means. Going forward, it’s automation, not globalization, that poses the bigger risk to the economic security of the American labor force. And unlike off-shoring, robots and super-smart software will affect both manufacturing and service jobs.

Oxford University researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne reckon that 47 percent of U.S jobs are at “high risk” of automation in the next two decades. Particularly threatened are jobs in transportation and logistics, as well as office and administrative support. Who thinks three million Americans will still be driving trucks 15 or 20 years from now? Looking at automation slightly differently, McKinsey finds that 45 percent of the activities that workers do “can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.” And the World Economic Forum predicts robots and artificial intelligence will result in a net loss of 5.1 million jobs over the next five years in advanced economies.

Some presidential candidates, most notably Marco Rubio, have talked about automation risk. But not Trump. One can only speculate why.