Trump tariffs and trade wars are destroying the US economy . . . again!

One of the so-called benefits of Trump tariffs and trade wars was that they would spur an increase in domestic manufacturing. So far, however, his “America First” economic agenda is having the opposite effect.

That was a lie. Instead, we are beginning to see early indicators of a coming economic hell just like the one Trump created during his first term (via Investopedia.com):

A closely followed survey of manufacturers indicated that the sector contracted for the sixth straight month in August, despite some signs of improvement. However, the data also showed that manufacturers struggle to handle the impact of tariffs while contending with higher prices for materials and lower spending from cautious buyers.

The Institute of Supply Management (ISM) manufacturing sector Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) improved to 48.7 in August, but still fell short of the 50 mark that indicates growth. The data showed that high input prices and elevated supply pressures from tariffs helped to wipe out improvements in new orders and employment levels.

Business leaders who responded to the survey said they’re feeling the impact of tariffs. Some businesses said the higher costs made domestic manufacturing more difficult, despite the goal of bringing factories back to the U.S.

“Tariffs continue to wreak havoc on planning/scheduling activities,” a respondent from a computer and electronic products business said. “Plans to bring production back into the U.S. are impacted by higher material costs, making it more difficult to justify the return.”

“‘Made in the USA’ has become even more difficult due to tariffs on many components,” an electrical equipment and appliances manufacturer said in the survey, noting that the company has laid off about 15% of its U.S. workforce. “The administration wants manufacturing jobs in the U.S., but we are losing higher-skilled and higher-paying roles. With no stability in trade and economics, capital expenditures and hiring are frozen.”

We witnessed these same failures in Donald Trump’s first term in office. Shortly after he was elected in 2016, Federal Reserve officials were already expressing grave concerns over his economic policies and how his aggressive changes in the areas of taxes, spending, and trade would create new inflationary pressures.

Trump didn’t officially launch his trade war during his first term until January 2018 when he placed tariffs on solar panel and washing machine imports, causing significant and immediate price increases. Later, in March 2018, he placed across-the-board tariffs on steel and aluminum, a move directly and immediately responsible for doubling the price of steel on US manufacturers and price-gouging by steel providers.

Facing heavy backlash for these actions from then-Sen. Ben Sasse and pre-Trumpist Sen. Mike Lee, Trump assured America that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” He went on to say that “the steel industry is in bad shape” even though over 70 percent of the steel used in America at the time came from America.

Unfortunately for the Republican spin machine, the economic damage inflicted by Trump’s tariffs and trade wars during his first term was evident when he was still in office, beginning at the one-year anniversary of their use.

Samsung North America CEO Tim Baxter said in a January 2019 interview with FOX Business that Trump’s tariffs had a negative impact on the prices of Samsung products.

“The industry actually ended up after the imposition of the section 201 [tariffs] about a $100 price increase on literally all laundry products. So, a category that was growing with the GDP is actually contracted in 2018.” (Emphasis mine.)

Did you notice he said that “the industry,” not just Samsung, had increased prices? Did you also notice that he said the industry “was growing” before Trump started his trade war?

According to estimates made by the National Taxpayer’s Union Foundation at the time, the total annual cost of Trump’s tariffs on consumers was $41.65 billion, an amount that exceeded the taxes Americans had paid for Obamacare ($34.6 billion).

When his 2020 reelection was clearly failing, two years of Donald Trump’s trade war had turned out just as predicted: the farm industry was decimated, manufacturing was in a recession, and 100% of the cost of tariffs had fallen directly on American businesses and consumers.

We learned in late 2021 after he was no longer in office just how devastating Trump’s use of tariffs and his trade war was on consumer prices and the economy (via Reason.com):

Those tariffs … are adding roughly 0.5 percent to annual inflation across the economy. That’s the conclusion drawn by Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. Trade Representative who is currently the vice president and director for trade and global markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank. Trump’s tariffs on washing machines, solar panels, steel, aluminum, and a host of Chinese-made goods are a “secondary but noticeable contribution” to overall inflation right now, Gresser writes.

That’s pretty much in line with what four economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve warned in February 2019, shortly after Trump began slapping tariffs on various goods. “Imports from China are an important part of overall U.S. imports of consumer and investment goods,” they wrote. “Thus, tariffs on these imports are likely to have sizable effects on consumer, producer, and investment prices in this country.”

The one and only thing that tariffs do is raise prices. That is their only function. Politicians might want to deploy tariffs (to raise prices) for a number of reasons: to protect domestic industries, to influence where in the world individuals choose to invest, to retaliate against what they perceive as unfair trade practices from other countries, and so on. But all those goals—and tariffs are poor ways of accomplishing most of them—are second-order functions. To the extent that any of those things occur, they happen because tariffs raise prices. (Emphasis mine)

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the damage Trump’s tariffs and trade wars inflicted on the US economy, certain talking heads in the so-called conservative media (*cough* Steve Deace *cough) continue to latch on to the hyperbolic “everything was better under Trump” economic nonsense coming from the cult:

“Trump-induced retardation” is an interesting use of words considering how Deace once referred to Cheeto Jesus as a “corporatist pond scum knuckle-dragger” before accepting him as his economic lord and savior. But alas, Trumpism replaced conservatism over at BlazeTV much like it has the Republican Party itself.

Unfortunately for Trump and his army of sycophants, the simple truth is that his tariffs and trade wars created an economic hell during his first term that only grew worse with his tyrannical response to COVID and the trillions of dollars he and the Republican Party spent to stimulate the economy. Trump’s economic policies got the ball rolling, but his handling of the COVID “pandemic” finished a job that America still hasn’t recovered from.

Donald Trump and his irrational and erratic economic policies did serious harm to the economy before and will do so again; and that’s simply the truth behind his tariffs and trade wars.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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