Trump and Pelosi set for 25th amendment battle over president’s ‘mental and physical capacity’ – live news

While on the topic of tariffs, Rajesh Kumar Singh has been reporting for Reuters on how the Trump administrations broken promises and tariff-raising policy on steel has impacted the job market negatively in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.

Four years after Trump promised a new dawn for the struggling US steel industry, Great Lakes Works – once among the state’s largest steel plants – has shut down steelmaking operations and put 1,250 workers out of a job. A year before plant owner United States Steel Corp called off a plan to invest $600 million in upgrades.

Trump’s strategy had centered on shielding US steel mills from foreign competition with a 25% tariff imposed in March 2018. He also promised to boost steel demand through major investments in roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

But higher steel prices resulting from the tariffs dented demand from the Michigan-based US auto industry and other steel consumers. And the Trump administration has never followed through on an infrastructure plan.

Nationally, the steel industry has been shedding jobs for the past year – since before the wider economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic – and now employs 1,900 fewer workers than it did when Trump took office, according to US Labor Department data

While the tariffs failed to boost overall steel employment, economists say they created higher costs for major steel consumers – killing jobs at companies including Detroit-based automakers General Motors and Ford. Nationally, steel and aluminum tariffs resulted in at least 75,000 job losses in metal-using industries by the end of last year, according to an analysis by Lydia Cox, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard University, and Kadee Russ, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis.

In all, they estimated, the trade war had caused a net loss of 175,000 US manufacturing jobs by mid-2019.

Democrats say they aim to recapture the votes of blue-collar workers they lost to Trump four years ago – one key factor in his victory over Hillary Clinton. Trump won Michigan by less than one percent of the statewide vote total.

Singh questions though whether such statistics will change swing-state voters’ minds. He spoke to Bill Wischman, a financial manager at a Ford manufacturing facility in Plymouth, Michigan, who says Trump has done more to protect US manufacturing than any of his predecessors.

“He has given a whole-hearted effort,” said 51 year old Wischman, who voted for Trump in 2016.