Well, what do you know—the American manufacturers benefitting the most from Donald Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum imports have deep ties to the Trump administration. Even as the administration set up a system designed to lessen the impact of the tariffs on companies that use imported metal, American steel giants close to top Trump advisers like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and trade adviser Peter Navarro have dominated the process. The New York Times writes:
As the head of a private equity fund, Mr. Ross bought and operated several steel companies, which he later sold at a profit, and he sat on a steel company’s board of directors until his confirmation.
The United States trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, represented United States Steel and other steel manufacturers in private practice as a lawyer, and so did his deputy, Jeffrey Gerrish. Nucor spent $1 million to fund a documentary, “Death by China,” made by Peter Navarro, a Trump trade adviser, in 2011.
As luck would have it, Nucor and United States Steel have unilaterally blocked the exemptions that many American companies like automakers and farm equipment manufacturers have sought. To date, Nucor and United States Steel together have objected to 1,600 exemption requests and, of those that have been decided, the two steel manufacturing behemoths have won every time.
Overall, American companies that use imported steel have filed for some 20,000 tariff exemptions and, by the end of July, the Commerce Department had rejected 639 of those.
Half of those denials came in cases where United States Steel, Nucor or a third large steel maker, AK Steel Holding Corporation, filed an objection, a New York Times analysis shows.
Most of the others failed because the company filing included a disqualifying mistake of some kind.
In the meantime, business for those Trump-allied companies has been booming. Nucor logged its highest second-quarter revenue in company history last month. United States Steel claimed last week that its profits have spiked since the tariffs began.
Denials of the exemptions filed by companies that depend on imported steel and aluminum appear to be partly the result of overwhelm on the part of the Commerce Department, which has been flooded with requests, and partly the result of a system that ensures the American steel giants will benefit.
“This process was not designed to be successfully navigated” by manufacturers seeking exclusions, said Richard Chriss, the president of the American Institute for International Steel, which has sued to block the tariffs on constitutional grounds.
Bottom line: Trump-aligned companies are benefitting once again to the detriment of everyone else. Same old cronyism story that dominates every Trump administration action.