The Wall Street Journal on Monday warned how President Donald Trump looks doomed to repeat a “blunder” from his first term with his newly-signed executive orders that slap a 25% tariff on all aluminum and steel imports.
It’s “worth revisiting the damage” that Trump caused the first time he hiked the tariffs on them in 2018, the newspaper’s conservative editorial board wrote.
Domestic steel producers benefited but those companies who use steel ended up with higher costs and had to lay off some workers as, among other consequences, American manufacturers became less competitive on the global stage, noted the Journal.
“This is political rent-seeking at its most brazen, and it benefits the few at the expense of the many,” the board wrote in its editorial, titled “The Truth About Trump’s Steel Tariffs.”
“None of this matters to Mr. Trump, whose dogmatic views on tariffs can’t be turned by evidence,” it added. “But we thought our readers would like to know the rest of the story.” Read the full editorial here.
Trump, when signing the executive orders on Monday, said it was “time for our great industries to come back to America” because “we were being pummeled by both friend and foe alike.”
Canada, Brazil, Mexico and South Korea are America’s biggest sources of steel.
Last week, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Journal’s editorial board trashed Trump’s idea to create a sovereign wealth fund by saying it “deserves to die in Congress” and predicting it would “destroy more wealth than it creates.”