Donald Trump, Paul Ryan face off in rare public GOP clash over tariffs
In a remarkably public confrontation, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican allies of President Donald Trump pleaded with him Monday to back away from his threatened international tariffs, which they fear could spark a dangerous trade war. Trump retorted: “We’re not backing down.” The president said U.S. neighbors Canada and Mexico would not be spared from his plans for special import taxes on steel and aluminum, but he held out the possibility of later exempting the longstanding friends if they agree to better terms for the U.S. in talks aimed at revising the North American Free Trade Agreement. “We’ve had a very bad deal with Mexico; we’ve had a very bad deal with Canada. It’s called NAFTA,” he declared. Trump spoke shortly after a spokeswoman for Ryan, a Trump ally, said the GOP leader was “extremely worried” that the proposed tariffs would set off a trade war and urged the White House “to not advance with this plan.” Likewise, Republican leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee circulated a letter opposing Trump’s plan, and GOP congressional leaders suggested they may attempt to prevent the tariffs if the president moves forward. Trump’s pledge to implement tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports has roiled financial markets, angered foreign allies and created unusual alliances for a president who blasted unfavorable trade deals during his 2016 campaign. Union leaders and Democratic lawmakers from Rust Belt states have praised the planned tariffs, joining with advocates within the administration including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. But the president has been opposed internally by Defense Secretary James Mattis and White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, who warned against penalizing U.S. allies and undercutting the economic benefits of the president’s sweeping tax overhaul. Likewise, the statement from Ryan’s office said, “The new tax reform law has boosted the economy, and we certainly don’t want to jeopardize those gains.” Asked about that public rebuke, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “Look, we have a great relationship with Speaker Ryan. We’re going to continue to have one, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.” Canada is the United States’ No. 1 foreign supplier of both steel and aluminum. Mexico is the No. 4 supplier of steel and No. 7 for aluminum. Congressional Republicans say any tariffs should be narrow in scope, and they privately warned that Trump’s effort could hurt the party’s hopes to preserve its majority in the fall elections. As the president dug in on his position, any potential compromise with foreign trading partners and Republican lawmakers was expected to still include some form of tariffs. “Trump is not someone who retreats,” said Stephen Moore, an economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former campaign adviser. “He’s going to need to be able to declare some victory here.” The tariffs will be made official in the next two weeks, White House officials said. “Twenty-five percent on steel, and the 10 percent on aluminum, no country exclusions — firm line in the sand,” said Navarro, speaking on “Fox and Friends.” Republican critics on Capitol Hill and within the administration argue that industries and their workers that rely on steel and aluminum for their products will suffer. The cost of new appliances, cars and buildings will rise for Americans if the president follows through, they warn, and other nations could retaliate. Two dozen conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the National Taxpayers Union, urged Trump to reconsider, writing in a letter that the tariffs would be “a tax on the middle class with everything from cars to baseball bats to even beer.” The Trade Partnership, a consulting firm, said the tariffs would increase U.S. employment in the steel and aluminum sector by about 33,000 jobs but would cost 179,000 jobs in the rest of the economy. The end result could erode the president’s base of support with rural America and even the blue-collar workers the president says he’s trying to help. “These are people that voted for him and supported him in these auto-producing states,” said Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association. Lusk noted that of the 16 states with auto plants, Trump won all but two. The administration has argued the tariffs are necessary to preserve the American aluminum and steel industries and protect national security. But Trump’s comments and tweets early Monday suggested he was also using them as leverage in the current talks to revise NAFTA. The latest round of a nearly yearlong renegotiation effort is concluding this week in Mexico City. At those talks, U.S Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said Monday that progress has been less than many had hoped and “our time is running short.” “I fear the longer we proceed, the more political headwinds we will feel,” he said. And he added that if three-way negotiations don’t work, “we are prepared to move on a bilateral basis.” More upbeat about progress until now, Dan Ujczo, a trade attorney with Dickinson Wright PLLC in Columbus, Ohio, said, “We were moving toward the finish line in NAFTA.” But he added, “This has the potential to throw the NAFTA talks off track.” He said neither Canada nor Mexico will want to be seen as giving in to U.S. pressure. Indeed, he said, Canada is probably already drawing up lists of U.S. products to tax in retaliation. Separately, Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo tweeted: “Mexico shouldn’t be included in steel & aluminum tariffs. It’s the wrong way to incentivize the creation of a new & modern #NAFTA.” The president opened the door to exempting Canada and Mexico from the tariffs, saying, “That would be, I would imagine, one of the points that we’ll negotiate.” But he added, “If they aren’t going to make a fair NAFTA deal, we’re just going to leave it this way.” Trump has long threatened to pull out of the 24-year-old trade pact if it
For many voters, Donald Trump is a thing called hope
On election night, when Donald Trump claimed victory in her home state of Wisconsin, Shay Chamberlin was so excited she screamed and fell over. Chamberlain believes Trump is her savior, sent by God to save America from ruin. She owns a women’s clothing store in this modest town; her husband runs a construction company. They have two children and barely get by on $44,000 a year, living paycheck to paycheck. In his victory speech, Trump called people like Chamberlain and her family America’s “forgotten men and women” – the blue-collar workers in the manufacturing towns of the Rust Belt and the hollowing coalfields of Appalachia who propelled him to an improbable victory. They felt left behind by progress, laughed at by the elite, and so put their faith in the billionaire businessman with a sharp tongue and short temper who promised to Make America Great Again. When Trump first ran, Chamberlain thought to herself: “That’s the man everybody has been praying for.” And she now feels vindicated by his victory. “This is a movement,” she said. “This isn’t a candidate anymore. This is a movement.” Not all of Trump’s support came from the blue-collar downtrodden. But the Republican’s overwhelming backing among whites with less than a college education is at least partly a reflection of how little the economic recovery since the Great Recession has benefited them. Their job opportunities have dwindled and their incomes have fallen, even as broader measures of the nation’s job market show improvement. But they also turned to him to hold back the tide of social change: same-sex marriage, transgender rights, a society growing more racially diverse. The white working class, long ignored, found an unlikely spokesman in Trump. He promised to build the wall to keep out immigrants. He promised to tear up trade deals that have ushered American factory jobs overseas. He promised to put blue-collar America back to work and restore the country to a time when white workers felt appreciated and fulfilled. “I feel like, not just most, but all Trump supporters are true patriots,” said 59-year-old Ginger Austin, who owns a graphics company in a tiny town in Jones County, one of the poorest places in North Carolina. “They love this country. But they’re taking our country away, and they’re changing it. They’re just changing everything. All our rights are just slowly being dwindled away.” She’s angry at the Republican Party she has supported all her life. She is angry at Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act. She is angry that America is changing, and worried that her grandchildren are growing up in a world too liberal and too politically correct. The nation awoke Wednesday morning to learn just how starkly divided it has grown: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by less than 200,000 ballots. But Trump won battleground states that had voted for Obama twice. Thousands of registered Democrats, including many former union workers from the mines and factories, crossed party lines and sided with Trump. For example, in Dunn County, where Shay Chamberlin lives, Obama beat Mitt Romney 53 percent to 46 percent in 2012, and John McCain 57 percent to 42 percent four years earlier. But it flipped to back Donald Trump, 52 percent to 41 percent, over Clinton. Scott Hiltgen, a 66-year-old small business owner in Wisconsin, called Washington a “cesspool” of career politicians, aware of and indifferent to the plight of the American worker. “We are considered flyover country, as you well know, and they don’t care about us,” he said. “And I think it was the silent majority that finally said, ‘Enough’s enough. We want a change. We don’t like the way things are going.’” Middle-aged white men with only high school degrees – the core of Trump’s support – saw their inflation-adjusted incomes plummet 9 percent from 1996 through 2014, according to Sentier Research, a data analytics firm founded by former Census Bureau officials. White male college graduates in the same age bracket, by contrast, saw their incomes jump 23 percent. The Great Recession wiped out millions of middle-income jobs in manufacturing, office administrative work and construction, and those jobs haven’t returned, even as the nation now has 6.5 million more jobs than it did before the recession began. In many parts of the country, they have been replaced with lower-income work in restaurants, hotels, and in home health care. This “hollowing out” of the nation’s economy has left many Americans with high school degrees feeling shut out of the middle class. Jerry Blackburn, a retired county official in rural Virginia, said he feels like people from someplace else took all they could from him and his neighbors and then left them with nothing. “They took our coal out of here and everybody got rich on it. And what did we get?” he asked. “We got black lung. We don’t have good water to drink, we don’t have roads, we don’t have anything except a bunch of broken down old coal miners that’s forgotten. But everybody else got rich on us.” On Wednesday morning, miners streamed into a convenience store on a highway between one struggling, West Virginia coal town and another. From behind the counter, manager Mary Jones recognized something she hadn’t heard in years: hope. They talked about jobs returning to this broken-down county. They talked about a chance at a brighter future. They talked about Donald Trump. “I think we sent a message to Washington that we’re tired of them sitting up there doing nothing to help the working-class people,” said Jones, a native of Wyoming County, where the collapse of the coal industry has left behind a string of tumbledown houses and a quarter of families in poverty. Coal trucks used to barrel by all day and the parking lot stayed full. No trucks come by anymore. The store is for sale. She’s not sure she’ll have a job much longer and is certain she won’t find another. They struggle to make enough money to pay
