How dumb does he suppose we are?
At his 2020 campaign launch this week, President Trump rehashed a familiar boast. “Thanks to our tariffs, American steel mills are roaring back to life. You know that,” he said.
His supporters may indeed think that. In reality, the exact opposite is happening. A few hours before Trump made that boast at his campaign kickoff, U.S. Steel announced that, because of falling steel prices and softening demand, it was mothballing some operations. “We are idling two blast furnaces in the United States and one blast furnace in Europe,” the company said.
Roaring back to life.
That Trump’s steel tariffs failed should be no surprise. As I wrote in March 2018, the industry’s woes have little to do with imports. The tariffs allowed U.S. steel-makers a short-term price hike — long enough for Trump to boast repeatedly that steel was “coming back” (“like never before!”) and to invent a false claim that U.S. Steel was “opening up six major facilities” — before things returned to where they were before. Actually, worse: The tariffs probably cost U.S. producers long-term market share.
