MAGA hat. James McNellis/Wikimedia commons
In 2024, Donald Trump became the first president in U.S. history to win an election despite four criminal indictments — one of which resulted in a conviction on 34 counts — and two impeachments. And the thing that did the most to get Trump past the finish line was the economy. Trump campaigned on affordability, promising to lower prices "on Day 1" and narrowly winning the popular voting by roughly 1.5 percent.
But Trump's steep new tariffs, according to Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and many other economists, are making the United States less, not more, affordable.
In an article published by The Guardian on November 2, journalist cpoints to Jeffersonville, Ohio as an example of a midwestern town where tariffs are having a negative impact.
"A host of Trump Administration policies — tariff measures and the end of clean vehicle tax credits worth thousands of dollars to car buyers — are causing multinational manufacturing companies to consider pausing hundreds of millions of dollars in future investments, a move that would hit small, majority-Republican towns such as Jeffersonville especially hard," Starr reports. "Moreover, a raid by ICE immigration officers on a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Ellabell, a small town in south-east Georgia in September that saw more than 300 South Korean workers detained and sent home, has sent shockwaves through places like Jeffersonville and the C-suites of international companies alike."
In Fayette County, Ohio, Trump won 77 percent of the vote in 2024. And according to resident Amy Wright, the county is hurting.
Wright told The Guardian, "The construction process has been slowing down…. Tariffs are affecting everything…. We've had more and more people who have voted for (Trump) show up and say: 'This is not good, this is not what we voted for.'"
According to Starr, "What’s happening in Jeffersonville is being mirrored across the Midwest."
"In Kentucky, Michigan and elsewhere, global giants Toyota and Stellantis have spent billions of dollars in small communities, much of which came in the form of clean energy tax breaks from the Biden Administration's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022," Starr explains. "Toyota's biggest production facility on the planet is in a small Kentucky town called Georgetown, where the company employs more than 10,000 people and has invested $11bn in the local economy since the late 1980s. These workers churn out nearly half a million vehicles and hundreds of thousands of engines every year…. In Indiana, one of the largest employers in the state, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche is reportedly considering pulling out of $50bn worth of investment in the coming years if Trump follows through on his executive order to target companies that don’t reduce drug prices."
Michael Hicks, who teaches economics at Ball State University, warns that economically, the worst is yet to come in the Midwest.
Hicks told The Guardian, "So, the bulk of tariff price increases will hit in the coming months. This matters, because factory employment is a major share of rural counties in the Midwest — about 30 precent in Indiana, and similar in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. These things will clearly have a political effect, but my hunch is not fully for several months. Overlaying all this is the risk of a significant (economic) downturn, where tariffs combine with a financial bubble that would surely hit rural — red — communities very hard."
Read Stephen Starr's full article for The Guardian at this link.