Thanks in large part to their influence, the administration made a complete policy reversal on NAFTA between dawn and dusk last week, with reports in the late morning indicating that an executive order pulling the United States out of the deal was in the works, followed by late-night phone conversations in which Trump assured leaders in Canada and Mexico that he intended only to get moving on renegotiating the pact and has no current intention of torpedoing it. Those 12 hours were an apt microcosm of the first 100 days, characterized by threats, leaks, ambiguity and then volte face. That it began the way it did remains troubling; that it ended the way it did indicates that for now, actual policy is being driven not by the red-meat nationalism of Bannon and his acolytes, but instead their nemeses, the wealthy elites.

The administration’s globalists speak the same language as the hundreds of mega-company CEOs who have visited the White House these past 100 days, and they support a modified version of the liberal-internationalist economic order that has dominated Washington for decades. They (including established Republican senators such as Orin Hatch of Utah, Pat Roberts of Kansas and others) might like to see NAFTA modified to reflect, say, rules of origin in a world where products are increasingly made in many countries and not one, but they recoil from the disruption that pulling out would cause. They might agree on corporate tax reform as a means to reduce the incentives of large companies keeping trillions of dollars offshore, but not on a radical overhaul of the tax system. And they do not share a pure zero-sum view of global commerce that sees a gain for someone else as a loss for us.