Trump Signs Steel And Aluminum Tariffs On National Security Grounds, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That American Factories Could Still Afford The Metal They Are Built From

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Citing the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and a national security rationale that placed Canadian rolled steel in the same category as a hostile military buildup, President Trump on Thursday signed proclamations imposing a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum, resolving a long-standing concern that American manufacturers could still purchase the raw materials they are made of at the price the market had set for them.

The measures, invoked under Section 232 of a Cold War statute that lets the president restrict imports deemed a threat to national security, applied broadly enough to cover the steel and aluminum arriving from the country's closest treaty allies, including Canada, the European Union, and Mexico, nations whose primary documented threat to the United States had to that point been a willingness to sell it metal.

The President framed the policy as a long-overdue correction. "Trade wars are good, and easy to win," he had written days earlier, articulating a position that economists, manufacturers, and the approximately 6.5 million Americans employed by industries that consume steel rather than produce it would spend the following two years testing against reality.

Under the new structure, the roughly 140,000 Americans who make steel and aluminum would enjoy federal protection from foreign competition, while the vastly larger number who use steel and aluminum to make automobiles, appliances, beer cans, and farm equipment would enjoy the higher input costs that protection produces. A source within the administration described the arrangement as "a great deal for American industry," declining to specify which portion of American industry was meant.

Foreign governments, for their part, responded to the security designation by imposing retaliatory tariffs on American bourbon, motorcycles, and soybeans, a sequence the administration characterized as evidence the strategy was working. Domestic steel prices rose, a Federal Reserve analysis would later estimate net manufacturing job losses, and the tariffs were followed within a year by a separate program of federal payments to compensate the farmers caught in the resulting crossfire.

At press time, the President was preparing to grant temporary exemptions to many of the same allied nations the tariffs had been signed to protect the country from, a process requiring each affected American company to file individually for permission to keep buying the metal it had always bought.

Who Benefits

§President Trump, who fulfilled a signature 2016 campaign promise to Rust Belt voters and reinforced his self-styled brand as the rare leader willing to win an easy war.
§Domestic steelmakers (Nucor, U.S. Steel, Cleveland-Cliffs), who received federal protection from lower-priced imports and the higher domestic prices that followed.
§Domestic aluminum smelters (such as Century Aluminum), who gained the same shelter from foreign competition.
§Trade lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants, who were handed a lasting growth industry in the tens of thousands of tariff-exclusion requests the policy forced companies to file.
§Foreign producers granted country exemptions and quotas, who converted a political negotiation into guaranteed, competition-limited access to the U.S. market.
§Steel producers in China, the stated target, whose direct exports to the United States were already small and who watched the heaviest costs fall instead on American allies and American buyers.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment