Trump’s trade throw down and possible war is scaring corporate America and is gonna cost them money, which will end up cost people jobs….
And an economy…
Trump’s party members in Congress are still sitting on their hands….
It could cost some of them their jobs….
President Donald Trump is now at full-scale war over trade policy with some of the Republican Party’s staunchest allies in big business, including executives at iconic American brands such as General Motors and Harley-Davidson who previously shied away from criticizing an often irascible president.
Trump’s approach has created a high-stakes showdown without recent political precedent: A Republican president betting that his populist approach to trade will thrill his working-class base and blow away any short-term economic fallout or reduced political support from the nation’s largest business organizations. His message to corporate America so far: I don’t care what you say, my base is with me.
On the other side, corporate titans and market analysts fear Trump is on the cusp of damaging the American economy — and that he will not recognize the failure of his approach until it’s too late.
“With every successive firecracker that Trump sets off, we see corporate leaders and groups emboldened and ready to go on the public stage to take him on,” said Nancy Koehn, a business historian at Harvard. “This isn’t the natural order of history that large business groups oppose a Republican president. Trump has a from-the-gut sense that his base will be with him come hell or high water. But it’s a very big bet with no certainty of success.”
The latest salvo in Trump vs. Big Business came Monday when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, long a stalwart backer of Republican economic policies, broke sharply with the president. “The administration is threatening to undermine the economic progress it worked so hard to achieve,” Chamber President Tom Donohue said in announcing a campaign to oppose Trump’s tariffs. “We should seek free and fair trade, but this is just not the way to do it.”…..
Note…
“Republican senators are at their breaking point with Donald Trump’s protectionist trade blitz,” Politico reports.
“Not a party meeting goes by these days where multiple Republicans don’t vent that the president isn’t listening to them — and plot how to fight back. The mounting frustration with the Republican president is a warning sign for the party amid what’s been a surprisingly favorable stretch.”
“But Republican senators say they can’t get the president to comprehend that his tariffs offensive could upend all of that progress in short order. Commodity prices in the heartland are sagging, U.S. allies are retaliating with tariffs of their own — and GOP leaders are fretting that the booming economy is about to go into a pre-midterms nosedive.”…..
Politicalwire….
White House says Trump willing to let economy crash and burn over his trade war
Donald Trump knows not a damn thing about trade, and he has surrounded himself by conservative functionaries like, sigh, Larry Kudlow who somehow manages to know even less. This is how we’ve gotten ourselves into a trade war with Canada, Europe, China, Mexico, and take-your-pick; some idiot convinced Trump he could impose punitive tariffs on America’s allies and competitors alike and none of those countries would bother to respond—a notion that is at odds with the entire history of modern trade. It turns out they were—surprise!—extremely wrong, yet again, and the now Trump and those nations are in a rapidly escalating tit-for-tat series of tariffs that are already threatening to put U.S. companies out of business, have caused iconic motorcycle company Harley-Davidson to announce they’re moving production to Europe, and are threatening to destabilize large swaths of the nation’s agricultural sector.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in the midst of this, took to television Monday morning to say that it doesn’t matter what the economic repercussions were, the White House was prepared to light every last one of you on fire in order to make whatever point Donald thinks he’s making. Sucks to be you, everyone….
More @ Daily Kos….