On Monday, Trump said, “China’s now paying us billions of dollars in tariffs and hopefully we’ll be able to work something out.” Uh, no, that’s not how it works. As Politico notes, “Importers of the products pay the tariffs and either eat the extra cost or pass it on to consumers.” Put another way: Tariffs are taxes. Trump just increased taxes on American consumers, without realizing it. Not even two senior administration officials, on a call with reporters, could defend Trump’s misconception. One of them said: “The tariffs work the way tariffs normally work.”
Equally daft is Trump’s claim that his steel tariffs, imposed earlier in the year, were already a raging success. He tweeted on Monday: “Our Steel Industry is the talk of the World. It has been given new life, and is thriving. Billions of Dollars is being spent on new plants all around the country!” Again, not quite. According to the government’s own figures, employment in primary metals manufacturing has gone up by about 1,000 jobs since February. Meanwhile, the increase of 10 percent in steel prices is affecting steel-consuming industries — which employ 6.5 million Americans, compared with just 140,000 working in steel mills.
The carnage is just beginning. Trump is spending $12 billion to bail out farmers hit by retaliatory tariffs, but there is no relief for other industries. As Business Insider notes, Mid-Continent Nail, the largest U.S. nail manufacturer, has already laid off 130 workers. Element Electronics, a TV maker, plans to lay off 127 workers, and Brinly-Hardy, a maker of lawn-care equipment, laid off 75. According to one study, Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs alone could cost 400,000 jobs. The expanding list of tariffs will prove even more costly.
Those sorts of numbers would cause any president with an iota of critical intelligence to reexamine the course he is on. But that’s not who we have in the Oval Office. We are governed by an invincible ignoramus who increasingly surrounds himself with advisers who are either ignorant, fanatical or opportunistic — and sometimes all three.
