Donald Trump's tariff tirade, sold as a patriotic push to “Make America Great Again,” is backfiring spectacularly, driving iconic US manufacturers like Boeing and John Deere to pack their bags and head for the exits. Far from reviving the heartland, Trump’s trade war is gutting it, and the numbers paint a grim picture of an economy teetering on the edge.
Let’s start with the carnage. Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2, 2025, unleashed tariffs as high as 54% on China, 46% on Vietnam, and 25% on South Korea, Japan, and Canada, among others. The pitch? Protect American jobs and bring manufacturing home. The reality? A complete disaster.
Companies such as Boeing, John Deere, Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Harley-Davidson are shuttering US plants, with at least 50,000 manufacturing jobs lost since April. While these figures are unverified, they align with the economic chaos unfolding. John Deere, threatened by Trump’s 200% tariff for moving production to Mexico, is doubling down on offshoring to dodge the skyrocketing costs of US production. Boeing, reliant on global supply chains, faces similar pressures as tariffs inflate costs and disrupt trade. Make no mistake, these companies are trying to survive, and are only looking to offshore their production because of Trump’s destructive tariffs, the exact opposite of what the orange fool apparently wanted to achieve.
Today, CNBC reported:
Trump trade tariffs slump widens to ‘nearly all U.S. exports,’ supply chain data shows
What began as a rapid drop in U.S. imports as shippers cut orders from manufacturing partners around the world has now extended into a nationwide export slump, with the U.S. agricultural sector and top farm products including soybeans, corn and beef taking the hardest hit.
The latest trade data shows that a slide in U.S. exports to the world, and China in particular, that began in January now extends to most U.S. ports, according to trade tracker Vizion, which analyzed U.S. export container bookings for the five-week period before President Donald Trump’s tariffs began and the five weeks after the tariffs took effect.
The farming sector has been warning of a “crisis” and ports data is showing more evidence of lack of ability to move product out to global markets. The Port of Portland, Oregon, tops the list with a 51% decrease in exports, while the Port of Tacoma, Washington, a large agricultural export port, has seen a 28% decrease. Tacoma’s top destinations for corn, soybeans and other ag exports include Japan, China and South Korea.
The economic toll is staggering. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects Trump’s tariffs will slash US GDP by 8% and wages by 7%, with middle-income households facing a $58,000 lifetime loss. That’s not pocket change…it’s a gut-punch to working families that will keep hurting for many years to come.
The Tax Foundation estimates an average tax hike of $1,300 per US household in 2025 alone. Inflation, already a voter sore spot, is spiking. The University of Michigan’s consumer confidence survey shows long-run inflation expectations at a 32-year high, with two-thirds of consumers bracing for rising unemployment. NPR reports the economy contracted at a 0.3% annual rate in Q1 2025, a sharp reversal from 2.4% growth in late 2024, with tariffs fueling recession fears.
Despite the fallout from Trump’s monumentally stupid tariff’s, right-wing idiots like John Key are still claiming that there is some sort of plan.
Today, 1 News reported:
"They're just a negotiating point. I think he simply put on widespread and high rates of tariffs on every country to give himself a leverage point and a negotiating point.
"What I think he actually grossly underestimated was the stock market reaction. He saw not just the stock market, but the bond market imploding.
The only time we should be hearing from John bloody Key is when he's trying to explain about his own insider trading scandal. Why exactly haven't the mainstream media reported on this?
The problem here is that Trump and his sycophants simply don’t understand how modern day manufacturing works. This wasn’t a plan to try and negotiate better trade deals. Instead, it appears to be a plan for Trump and his mates to manipulate stock markets to line their own pockets. If this was a plan to negotiate better deals, it has failed spectacularly and come at the cost of thousands of US jobs and trillions of dollars.
Ultimately, Trump has eroded trust in the United States to such a degree that countries are now actively avoiding trade negotiations. Key’s claim that there was a workable plan is perhaps the dumbest analysis yet, given that Trump is displaying all the signs of a dictator in complete cognitive decline and his tariff’s regime has entirely failed to achieve the stated goal of bringing back manufacturing to the US.
Markets are reeling too. The S&P 500 plummeted nearly 5% on April 3, its worst day since June 2020 when the entire world had to shut up shop because of Covid. It even flirted with bear market territory. JP Morgan now pegs the odds of a global recession at 60%, up from 40%, solely because of the orange buffoon. Trump’s claim that tariffs will “make the country boom” again rings hollow as consumer confidence also tanks to its lowest rate since the pandemic.
The irony? Trump’s tariffs are doing the exact opposite of what he promised and hurting his blue-collar supporters the most. Instead of reindustrialising America, Trump's idiotic tariffs are deindustrialising it, pushing manufacturers abroad and jacking up prices for consumers. This isn’t economic patriotism; it’s economic vandalism. As the US economy shrinks and China’s grows, Trump’s trade war looks less like a strategy and more like a self-inflicted wound...a wound that the United States would be well advised to cauterize before it bleeds out.
