President Trump’s tariff’s dealt another blow to a red state as a TV-maker announced it would close the plant in Fairfield Country, South Carolina announced citing Trump’s tariffs, resulting in layoffs for 126 jobs.
The Winnsboro plant of maker Element Electronics will be closed in response to the president’s tariffs, the local paper The State reported. The layoffs are to take effect in October.
The area has suffered blow after blow of job losses, and Element was one of the areas largest remaining employers according to the local paper.
The State obtained a letter by Element written to the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce in which they cited “the layoff and closure is a result of the new tariffs that were recently and unexpectedly imposed on many goods imported from China, including the key television components used in our assembly operations in Winnsboro.â€
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While it’s true that Trump’s tariffs have resulted in big hits in his own areas of support, Trump won the state 54.9% to 40.8% for Clinton, but Fairfield County went for Clinton by 61.6% to 35.8% for Trump.
It will surprise zero people to learn that Fairfield County is majority black. The county is 56.6% black and 37.5% white. I’m going to go out on a limb based on his lapsed, failed response to Puerto Rico and and attacks on California as it battles the largest wildfire in the state’s history to say that I wouldn’t expect Trump to rush in with the same $12 billion welfare program he has devised for the farmers his tariffs are harming.
South Carolina is a heavy manufacturing state. Volvo has already said it might not be able to hire the 4,000 employees it was going to hire for a new plant in South Carolina and BMW said the tariffs threaten 45,000 jobs in South Carolina. On July 30, BMW increased the sales price of two of its sport utility vehicles produced in the U.S. due to increased costs that can be traced to Trump’s tariffs.
Trump thinks he’s saving blue collar jobs, or at least that is how he promotes his reckless tariff wars, but in fact he is taking aim at the very blue-collar voters that are his base. Reuters said in a TV commentary segment, “Because the U.S. president is firing ‘tariff bullets’ blindly in the world, the steel plates he’s taxing are now being used to deflect those “bullets” back at American workers.”
Trump approaches complex problems with the mindset of a child. Thus, he has just destroyed the careful work done to rebuild jobs in the United States by appealing to foreign auto companies to manufacture here. After taking a 27% hit in profits, Daimler told Reuters if the hits keep coming, the company “will reconsider its production layout, including the possibility of establishing a new plant in China.”
The Financial Times pointed out that Trump’s on steel and aluminum products produced in other countries impact the auto sector and disrupt the entire industrial chain, “Donald Trump has begun dismantling the world known by carmakers as he attempts to implement his election promise to bring back U.S. jobs and tear up international agreements he sees as harming blue-collar voters.”
Trump’s “solutions” appealed to people who believed that the jobs problems they faced were something an attitude could fix. A tougher attitude would solve things. But sadly, that is not the case and that tougher attitude has taken aim at those very blue-collar workers whose jobs prospects might have made them easy targets for Trump’s big, empty promises.
Make America Great Again seems to be kicking its own voters right in the gut as collateral damage for a trade war going nowhere. Maybe Trump is happy to see people suffer who didn’t vote for him (he seems to take pleasure in this), but he doesn’t seem to get that the economy doesn’t work in pockets like that. Even if it did it wouldn’t be okay, but not only is he harming his own voters but he’s harming the United States.
A president can’t be a bull in the china shop and send their “fixer” lawyer in to threaten others when things go wrong on trade. That’s not how negotiation works in the real world.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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