“To protect our great steelworkers, I placed tariffs on nations that were dumping cheap, foreign steel all over the place. And we have created an incredible industry out of nothing. It was ready to go out. Within months, steel imports dropped by 26% and American steel production surged by 18 million tons, almost immediately. Biden abandoned the steel industry and saved other industries that were worthless, but he didn't save the steel industry. We saved the steel industry. You wouldn't have a steel industry right now.”
— Speech, 08/20/2020
Trump is wrong to boast. Shares of America’s largest aluminum and steel makers have plunged since Trump imposed tariffs. There are fewer aluminum production jobs in the United States than when the tariffs were imposed, while steel mills have added only a few thousand jobs. Steel production barely increased; aluminum production rose more, but as of April it remains more than 40 percent down from where it was in 2015. In August, 2019, U.S. Steel announced it was laying off hundreds of workers in response to "ongoing challenging market conditions." Higher steel prices resulting from the tariffs also dented demand from the Michigan-based U.S. auto industry and other steel consumers. Nationally, steel and aluminum tariffs resulted in at least 75,000 job losses in metal-using industries by the end of last year, according to an analysis by Lydia Cox, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard University, and Kadee Russ, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis. In all, they estimated, the trade war had caused a net loss of 175,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs by mid-2019.