It’s not going to work out like Trump claims.

A construction worker in Eastern United States that we know reports the following conversation he had with some fellow workers about the effect of Trump’s coming tariffs. We also discuss the economic effects and the chaos that seems to be coming and what MAGA stands to gain from it. Investors have no illusions, as they are flocking to gold.

I had to make a purchase from a large steel distributor here in the tri state area. This distributor pretty much carries every single kind of steel and aluminum imaginable and can cut it to any size or shape you could possibly need. The customer line was exceedingly long, because of the fact that tomorrow is Trump’s “Liberation Day”, when apparently a lot of the tariffs are going to go into effect, or the tariff policy, and they’re going to be officially announced, or something. Who really knows? So every company that needed to make any purchases whatsoever that were going to be eventually affected by the tariffs was trying to get all of their orders done before the official policy went into effect, to avoid having to pay more than they would in our regular circumstance. I would guess 2/3 of the workers on this line were Trump supporters, and I had a conversation between me and two other workers who are in line picking up orders, and the cashier,

We started to talk about whether or not the tariffs were going to really go into effect the next day, and how big of a difference it was going to make. So there was a lot of back and forth, which was pretty uninformed, and I decided to try and inject some facts into the situation. I said, “Well, regardless of what opinions we have, the people that own the world, the billionaires, are pretty convinced that they’re going into effect probably tomorrow, and it’s going to be pretty bad, because they’re moving all their money into gold.” Then I pulled out my Financial Times to show them the headline from that day. You know, to prove my point that people who really make decisions about how the economy runs are convinced this is going to be a pretty cataclysmic event. The topic then drifted into what that would do to the economy longer term, and whether or not this would be good, bad or wouldn’t make that big of a difference. I said, “well, if the tariffs are really going into effect, and at rate that he’s indicated they will be, that means there’s going to be somewhere between at least a 25 to 30% increase in vast majority of material input costs any construction job in the United States, because steel, aluminum and timber, which are like the main components of any construction project, are going to be affected. To that effect, any job that got bid at current prices is going to have to make purchases in a new context where those prices are that much higher – it isn’t going to be able to make money. The contracts are going to have to get renegotiated, or the jobs are going to have to get canceled, and that probably means there’s going to be a lot less construction work.” One of the other workers, who’s a Trump supporter, remarked that what it might do is encourage people to build more manufacturing here, make more of these materials here in the United States.

I replied by saying that we don’t have the facilities in the United States to make up for all that raw material. The cashier remarked to that as well, saying that the vast majority of all of the base vendors that they use get their steel, aluminum, etc, are in Canada or other countries that they have, almost no American made raw materials that they sell. Then the Trump supporter countered by saying, “Well, no, we could still build it. We used to build it here before.” I replied by saying, “well, it would take at least four years build up the capacity necessary to able to even come close to the picking up to all the production we’re going to be losing from other countries.” And he replied by saying, “Well, maybe that’s why Trump wants a third term so he has enough time to finish the job.”

I think this shows that there’s an awareness amongst workers that are going to be directly affected on a day to day basis by the increase in these prices, and there’s an understanding that this is not going to be good for anyone in the short term. Unfortunately, the real hardcore Trump supporters have figured out a methodology to spin any occurrence, even ones that are objectively bad for them in their real lives, to something that is somehow positive. This doesn’t bode particularly well for any efforts to organize that sector of the working class.

Our only hope trying to organize a large based working class movement is going to be amongst workers who are going to be hurt by what’s about to happen, but don’t have a strong ideological commitment to Trump and the MAGA movement.

Effect on manufacturing
(We talked about the overall development of manufacturing under Biden and since then.)

There’s this company called the Prysmian Group which is a multinational cable manufacturer. They make everything from steel wire ropes for structures to multi conductor cables for transmission of electricity. You name, if it’s any type of cable, specifically ones that involve a large number of conductors or wire rope. They’re probably the single biggest manufacturing corporation worldwide. So they have corporate headquarters in Europe, specifically Milan, also an additional large office in Amsterdam, and they have factories all over the world.

When Build Back Better under Biden pledged a massive amount of funding into building wind turbine infrastructure, this created a large demand for different types of cable that the Prysmian Group manufacturers, specifically multi large scale structural cable that can transmit electricity. They saw this as a really positive market in the United States. They decided to open up a factory in Massachusetts that would handle all orders in the United States made to this company, orders made for wire rope, multi conductor cable, mass transmission line cable, whatever. All this US production was going to come back to the United States. Trump got rid of all the federal funding for wind turbines in his first week office, which meant that that market the Prysmian Group was trying to tap into was no longer there. They scrapped their plans to build a factory in Massachusetts.

There’s numerous other examples of that with other companies that would have been affected by the pulling back of spending and federal infrastructure. But it just goes to show this industrial policy is never going to have any legs if it isn’t coupled with massive federal investment. The Trump administration has made extremely clear they have absolutely no interest. So what you would guess at the end of that would be probably a net loss of jobs rather than a net gain.

Oaklandsocialist
I’ve been thinking a lot about the the effects the tariffs are going to have and what what Trump stands to gain from creating chaos. I think they have a dim awareness that chaos will help develop an extreme right wing or even a fascist movement.

Speaker 
Think about this from a standpoint of their pure political cynicism. Say, all politicians aren’t cynical, but they’re real, like basic cynicism, actually, from A Song of Ice and Fire, you know, the Game of Thrones. It’s a series of books by Jordan Martin. They’re inspired a lot by historical events, specifically the English War of the Roses. And what they basically explore is kind of like internal political dynamics and how people rise to power in certain circumstances.

It’s not really a fantasy novel in the sense of like, good guys versus bad guys. It’s really just about like how politics works in society. There’s this character in it who says, “the reason why you’re never going to be successful in this world is because you view chaos as this swirling chasm of misery that people get sucked into and never return. That’s not the correct historical understanding of chaos. Anyone who studied history understands Chaos is a ladder. Chaos creates moments in time that allow the most insignificant of men to rise up and become kings, and only those people who understand that can ever hope to achieve anything in this world.” He’s saying that in a fantasy medieval context. But if you think about it, the real strong argument to me is “don’t give a shit about what happens to everybody around. Chaotic situations cause people to look for alternatives to the status quo, regardless of how radical it is.”

In a situation like the present, a radical solution to chaos could very easily and reasonably be articulated as some kind of fascist movement. I think that’s probably the basic governing, governing, the basic philosophy on power that a lot of these people have is the ladder. 

Final note: For a more in-depth analysis of inflation, world trade, and tariffs, see A primer on inflation, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.