President Donald Trump on Friday announced a dramatic increase in tariffs on imported steel, doubling the rate from 25% to 50%. But the move is already drawing fire from inside his former inner circle.
“We are going to be imposing a 25% increase,” Trump said Friday during a campaign-style speech in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. “We’re going to bring it from 25% to 50%, the tariffs on steel into the United States of America, which will even further secure the steel industry in the United States. Nobody’s going to get around that.”
The announcement quickly sparked backlash, including from far-right economist Stephen Moore, a former Trump economic adviser and current senior visiting fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation.
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“I’m a little queasy about these steel tariffs,” Moore said during a CNN interview just moments after the announcement. “There’s been a lot of studies that looked at what happened when Trump raised steel tariffs in his first term. And what most of the evidence finds is that we did save steel jobs.”
The problem with the tariffs, Moore added, “is that all the other companies – the manufacturers, the car companies, and so on – that use steel, their steel was now more expense.”
Moore said the end result is “pretty clear: We lost jobs because of the steel tariffs.”
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” he concluded.
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