Former President Donald Trump’s tariff proposals are bad enough, indeed awful, but his hypocrisy is just as bad.
Trump, who miserably failed to cut the trade deficit or boost manufacturing in his first term as president, is pushing an across-the-board import tariff of between 10% and 20% that would almost certainly cause immense price hikes domestically, goad other countries into retaliating, and perhaps set off an international trade war with consequences reminiscent of the Smoot-Hawley tariff that colossally exacerbated the 20th century’s Great Depression.
On Sept. 24, in Savannah, Georgia, he repeated his tariff threats while saying that, on the other hand, he would cut corporate tax rates for domestic manufacturing. He is right that corporate income tax rates should be cut, or even eliminated, but wrong to apply the lower rate only to manufacturing and wrong to tie it to huge tariffs.
Either way, though, Trump this very week is not living up to his own words.
“Here is the deal that I will be offering to every major company and manufacturer on Earth — I will give you the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burden,” Trump said in Savannah. “And free access to the best and biggest market on the planet. But only if you make your product here in America. It all goes away if you don’t make your product here. And hire American workers for the job. If you don’t make your product here, then you will have to pay a tariff, a very substantial tariff.”
Any company on Earth, right? Let’s give him leeway for the usual Trumpian hyperbole and allow him to make exceptions, in line with plenty of earlier comments, for companies controlled by hostile nations such as China. Still, there is no way to interpret that sentence in a way allowing Trump to oppose a company owned by investors from a very friendly foreign nation. Yet the very day before his Savannah fulminations, Trump told the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito that he still opposes the bid of Japan-based Nippon Steel to pay a generous amount to buy U.S. Steel, located near Pittsburgh.
U.S. Steel is struggling, big time. Without the sale to Nippon, the company almost certainly will shutter or at least massively reduce its Pennsylvania operations. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that without foreign ownership, “there is no long-term future for steelmaking in Pittsburgh.” It said that blocking the sale would cause “mass layoffs” of as many as 11,000 Pennsylvania employees.
The paper continued that if the sale is disallowed, it “would weaken America’s ability to produce steel, which is the real danger to the country’s economic strength and security. No other nation’s economic and security interests are as aligned with the United States’s as Japan’s, which is also invested in checking the growth of Chinese influence.”
In opposing the sale to Nippon, Trump is bucking the local Republicans who best understand the stakes. On Aug. 30, state Senate President Pro Tem Kim Ward, a Republican from Westmoreland County, which neighbors Pittsburgh, praised the Nippon offer.
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“Nippon Steel’s investments in cutting-edge infrastructure at the Mon Valley Works facility will not only jump-start innovation and secure jobs for our region to grow and compete, but will also generate critical construction jobs for the building trades which will help create certainty for all,” she said.
If Trump really wants to welcome all friendly companies that hire American workers to manufacture things in the U.S., he should welcome Nippon with open arms. Instead, in order to pretend on the national campaign trail to be for “America First,” Trump is demagoguing the issue, even though his position actually would cost U.S. jobs. If he really does mean his tariff threats, but he isn’t sincere about his welcome mat to “every major company and manufacturer on Earth” to build in the U.S., then his second term could be economically disastrous.