US Steel lays off Michigan workers a week after Trump bragged 'business is thriving'

Just last week, Donald Trump was bragging about the success of his steel tariffs. This week, U.S. Steel is laying off workers in Michigan—temporarily, but for as long as six months.

“Steel was dead. Your business was dead. Okay? I don’t want to be overly crude. Your business was dead. And I put a little thing called ‘a 25 percent tariff’ on all of the dumped steel all over the country. And now your business is thriving” Trump said, in the same Monaca, Pennsylvania, speech at which he had a coerced audience of workers told they’d lose pay if they didn’t attend. “And I’ll tell you what,” he added later, “Those steel mills—U.S. Steel and all of them, all of them—they’re expanding all over the place. New mills. New expansions. We hadn’t have—we didn’t have a new mill built in 30 years, and now we have many of them going up.”

This is, of course, false. There are not “many” new steel mills going up (and on top of it, there had been at least one built within the last 30 years). U.S. Steel is investing $1 billion in its Mon Valley Works facilities, but there’s no guarantee of new jobs there.

And now U.S. Steel is idling blast furnaces and laying off workers—temporarily, we very much hope—as steel prices have fallen significantly from a 2018 peak shortly after Trump announced his tariffs. The steel tariffs did at least temporarily lead to increased investment and jobs. But of course Trump had to lie about the scale of the improvements and you’re unlikely to see him admitting to the slump that’s hitting now.