President Trump believes that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” So he started one.
Now the casualties are beginning to return home from the battlefield, and on Capitol Hill Wednesday, the people’s representatives presented some of them to Wilbur Ross, the president’s billionaire commerce secretary.
“Corn, wheat, beef and pork are all suffering market price declines . . . due to current trade policies,” complained Sen. John Thune (S.D.). “With every passing day, the United States loses market share to other countries.”
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) said “we watched the soybean market start to collapse” because of trade-war concerns.
Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio) warned about steel and auto producers in Ohio, “hit harder than any other state by the Canadian retaliatory tariffs.”
From Pennsylvania, Sen. Patrick J. Toomey cautioned that Kraft-Heinz may move its ketchup production to Canada to avoid retaliatory tariffs.
Sen. Johnny Isakson (Ga.) put in a plea over Coca-Cola’s rising aluminum can costs.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah warned that contracts have dried up for a steel fabricator in his state because of the tariffs, and “multibillion-dollar investments for new manufacturing plants that employ thousands of workers are also being put at risk.”
And those were just the Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee.
Ross, 80 , wears eyeglasses and a hearing aid, but he didn’t need either to see and feel the bipartisan anger, and the fear among Republicans, about the damage Trump’s incipient trade war is already doing to steel users, seafood businesses, cherry and potato farmers, ranchers, uranium producers, newsprint users, brewers — you name it. Even lawmakers sympathetic to Trump’s aim of cracking down on China were aghast at the clumsy way the policy is being administered, the cumbersome exemption process, and the bizarre justifications of the policy that declare Canada a national-security risk but give favorable treatment to a Chinese company accused of espionage against the United States.
