WASHINGTON (news agencies) — President Donald Trump is once again lashing out at three of his biggest irritants: foreign steel, foreign aluminum and Canada.
Trump on Wednesday will effectively plaster 25% taxes – tariffs – on all steel and aluminum imports. And on Tuesday the president said the U.S. would double the forthcoming levy on the two metals to 50% if they come from Canada — only for the White House to pull back its threat by the afternoon after the province of Ontario suspended its own retaliatory plans.
The pain won’t just be felt by foreign steel and aluminum plants. The tariffs will likely drive up costs for American companies that use the metals, such as automakers, construction firms and beverage makers that use cans. The threats to the economy have rattled stock markets.
“Unilateral tariffs will raise prices, cost American jobs, and strain alliances,” Philip Luck and Evan Brown of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in a report last month.
The latest tariffs are an amped-up replay from Trump’s first term.
In 2018, in an effort to protect American steelmakers from foreign competition, he imposed tariffs of 25% on foreign steel and 10% on aluminum, using a 1962 trade law to declare them a threat to U.S. national security.
The tariffs landed most heavily on American allies: Canada is the No. 1 supplier of foreign steel and accounts for more than half of aluminum exports to the United States. Mexico, Japan and South Korea are also major steel exporters to the U.S.
The president insists that steel imports are a threat to the very existence of the United States. “If we don’t have, as an example, steel, and lots of other things, we don’t have a military and frankly we won’t have — we just won’t have a country very long,” Trump said last week in his joint address to Congress.
His 2018 sanctions were gradually watered down.
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