Donald J. Trump’s Latest Tariff Adventure

Feb 17, 2025

With his typical grandstanding, Trump announced across-the-board 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, claiming that these tariffs will resurrect rusting factories and provide millions of jobs in the U.S.

There is nothing new about all this big tariff talk. Back in 2018, Trump also issued big tariffs, accompanied by the same promises. But the real winners were the steel and aluminum producers in the U.S. They made huge profit windfalls by simply raising their prices to match the higher prices of imported steel and aluminum. As for all the new jobs that Trump promised … they never materialized.

On the contrary, the tariffs cost jobs. Higher prices for basic materials hit the U.S. auto industry and other metal-using industries hard. Trump’s tariffs also prompted retaliation from other countries. Canada, for example, imposed tariffs on 12.8 billion dollars in U.S. products, including 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum. Harley-Davidson shifted some production to Thailand to avoid Europe’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. motorbikes.

Estimates are that by mid-2019, steel and aluminum tariffs had resulted in at least 75,000 job losses in metal-using industries, and a net loss of 175,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs.

The biggest U.S. companies protected their profits by getting the Trump administration to grant them special exemptions from any tariffs. These exemptions gave those favored companies a big advantage over other competitors that didn’t get the exemptions. Of course, to get these exemptions, big companies hired extremely expensive lobbyists and lawyers, who were usually former Trump administration officials. So, while Mr. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, his tariffs and trade rules did the exact opposite.

In 2020, so much pressure from U.S. and other companies had built up on the Trump administration, it negotiated exemptions to entire countries, including Canada and Mexico. A year later, Biden extended those exemptions to the E.U. and Japan.

Thus, Trump’s 2018 steel and aluminum tariffs were nothing but a scam. And his new tariffs promise to be no different.

But behind all the tariff babble, a deeper, darker scam is being played out. Its aim is to convince American workers that the problems in our lives can be overcome if trade is stopped from coming into the country.

Like all scams, it depends on dazzling people with what appear to be “facts,” so they stop looking at what their own lives tell them to be true.

Here’s what is true: the capitalist class is getting ever richer by robbing the working class of everything possible. The capitalists have robbed us of the steady jobs that part of the working class used to have and no longer exist. They robbed us of wages and pensions. And every basic industry has seen a near collapse in the number working.

Increased trade didn’t do that. The bosses’ incessant drive for profit did. Those industries where jobs are disappearing are making larger profits than ever before—by driving some people to work faster, using machines and computers to eliminate other people’s jobs.

Sitting back quietly, praying for tariffs to bring back jobs, won’t get us anywhere. On the contrary, these lies are used to try to tie the workers to their own bosses and politicians, who are really the workers’ worst enemies. The interests of workers in the U.S. lie with the workers in other countries, who are facing the very same bosses and the very same attacks.

Our fight is their fight.