EDITORIAL
Trump, Tariffs and Trade Wars

Jul 13, 2025

Trump says his trade war, all those tariffs on big and small countries alike, are aimed at bringing back manufacturing jobs for U.S. workers. According to Trump, world trade has decimated U.S. industry so much, it has practically disappeared.

Trump’s rhetoric is the same as what union officials and liberal Democrats, like Bernie Sanders, have been saying for decades.

It is true that millions of industrial jobs have been destroyed in this country. But industry has not disappeared in the U.S., like Trump and the Democrats say. On the contrary, industrial production is five times higher in the U.S. than at the end of World War II. And U.S. industry churns out twice as much production as it did in 1980, when we were told that all our jobs were going overseas, to places like China, or Mexico, or anywhere else.

Jobs were not going overseas. They were destroyed by big U.S. companies right here, which drove fewer workers to do ever more work. As a result, one worker today does the work that it took six workers to do in the 1940s.

Over the years, companies cut jobs, even as they increased production. It’s the way they increased their own profits and wealth at the expense of their work force.

Look at what happened in the steel industry, where Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on steel imports last month. Trump justified these tariffs by claiming that a flood of cheap imports had destroyed the steel industry and workers’ jobs.

No, imported steel didn’t destroy U.S. steel workers’ jobs. The steel companies operating in the U.S. did. Today one steel worker produces as much steel as 10 steel workers produced in the 1970s.

Those enormous productivity increases could have benefited the people doing the work. They could have brought higher living standards, more time off, shorter work weeks and early retirement.

But in this capitalist system, they just brought more profit.

In their pursuit of profit, the steel companies slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs. They abandoned big parts of the industrial heartland in the Midwest. They laid waste to its economy and population.

This is not the first time that Trump introduced tariffs on steel, claiming that they would bring steel worker jobs back to the U.S. He introduced tariffs on steel in 2018, during his first term.

But after the tariffs were imposed, the steel companies didn’t increase production. They didn’t hire more workers. All they did was raise their prices. For them, big tariff increases were an opportunity to greatly increase their profits, a profit bonanza. A year later, 75,000 manufacturing jobs had been destroyed. Steel is used in the production of other things, like autos and appliances, and the price increase in steel caused cutbacks in production and jobs.

Those tariffs were not aimed at protecting jobs or bringing jobs back, like Trump claims. They were aimed at increasing the profits and wealth of the U.S. capitalist class in a worsening and more violent trade war.

What a disaster! All because everything is run simply for the profit of a tiny minority, a few thousand families worldwide, a few thousand billionaires, who own and control everything.

This is the situation in which we find ourselves today. It won’t get better so long as the capitalists run things, so long as they make the decisions.

The working class could take power away from the capitalists. It could sweep them away. It could organize a new economy, one that is organized to serve every person.

Workers aren’t doing that today, you say? Yes, but they could. When they wake up from their long sleep. Easier said than done, you say? Yes, but it could be done.