Ohio's voters are getting a little more than they bargained for after rolling the dice on the orange grifter with zero governing experience. When candidate Donald Trump told a room full of manufacturers in Dayton how "easy" it was going to be to enforce the new trade policies he was promising, many thought his bluster amounted to little more than tough talk several months out from an election. "We're not going to have trade wars," Trump reassured them.
That turned out to be fake news. But they probably should have believed him when he repeatedly promised to antagonize the world on trade. "The era of economic surrender will finally be over," Trump pledged at a Pennsylvania campaign stop in June 2016.
Here's how that muscular posture is working out now for manufacturers in Dayton, according to Huffington Post.
Mike Gearhardt, who was a roundtable participant during Trump’s Dayton campaign visit, said he could not have anticipated that Trump’s “generalities and platitudes” that afternoon would translate into as much as $700,000 in lost profits this year for his employee-owned JBK Manufacturing.
“I do not think anybody expected this to escalate to the level that it’s at,” he said.
It's unclear from the article whether Gearhardt actually voted for Trump, but JBK's profits have been ravaged by Trump's 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent tax on imported aluminum, both of which the company uses to produce jet engine parts for aircraft. It's the same exact dynamic that pushed Wisconsin-based Harley Davidson to announce it was moving some of its manufacturing operations overseas.
Ohio voters have been hit hard on a number of levels by Trump's policies of ignorance. In Trump-friendly central Ohio, for instance, soybean farmers started fretting months ago over Trump's escalating tariff threats with China. That “negotiation” has since spiraled out of control.
In the meantime, Trump's tax cuts have proven underwhelming to many of the state’s working-class voters. At this point, whatever small bump they saw in their paychecks may have already been eaten up by rising gas prices. For the sake of the country, we better hope that Trump's policies actually manage to persuade some voters in states like Ohio to think twice before blindly voting for more Republican rule this fall.