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Meanwhile in Canada
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Read what a US aluminum manufacturer has to say about the reality of Trump's tariffs:
"We are the kind of company that should be thriving under President Trump’s tariffs.
At Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, we melt aluminum and cast it into precision parts for trucks, medical equipment and satellites at our facilities across the northern Midwest. Our inputs are sourced locally. Our labor is old-fashioned American industrial grit. Our customers are national champions of industry. We are the poster child for the type of company the president seeks to support.
In theory, the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act should boost our production.
Reality has turned out to be different.
When Trump won the election, like many manufacturers, we were hopeful. The prior two years had brought shrinking demand for manufactured goods. The morning after the election, I sent a gushing note to employees saying that while I had voted differently, I was excited for what might come. Tariffs could spur reshoring. Tax cuts and deregulation might lift business sentiment. As we waited for clarity on the president’s policies, I wrote in a LinkedIn post that it felt like metal manufacturing in America was on the cusp of renewed vitality.
Six months into his presidency, that optimism has faded. U.S. manufacturing has stalled, input costs from tariffs are rising at the fastest rate in nearly two years, business investment has slowed and demand readings hover at contraction levels.
What became clear when the president finally announced his tariff policy is that it lacks any genuine understanding of the businesses it claims to support.
A few weeks ago, I joined 15 other industrial CEOs for a meeting in Washington, D.C. We hosted one of the top congressional Republicans. She began by saying she meets with the president two or three times a week and that he remains firmly committed to the tariffs he launched on “Liberation Day.” It was meant to be reassuring.
It wasn’t. Her comments landed with a thud. The room, filled with manufacturing executives from across the country — including the CEO of one of the largest Wisconsin manufacturers, many of them longtime conservatives — went silent. After she left, one CEO turned to me and said, “Wow, that was frosty.”
The sentiment wasn’t anger; it was disorientation.
What should have been a home-field crowd felt anything but. These are the people the policy is supposed to help. And yet none of us supported the tariffs. Not even a company like ours, which arguably benefits the most. Even the venerable National Association of Manufacturers opposes the tariffs. It may surprise you to learn that our voices aren’t part of the conversation.
The tariff policies are increasingly looking like the misguided conviction of one person: the president. Even among his political allies, there is no real support. Congress has taken no action to codify this approach into law. Instead, the future of the tariffs is being fought over in courtrooms. Seemingly, there is no serious constituency behind this policy other than President Trump himself.
The deeper irony is this: We’ve always said uncertainty is bad for business. But at this point, the bigger fear is that the uncertainty might end, and we’ll be left with certainty around bad policy.
We saw it again May 31, when Trump doubled the Section 232 aluminum tariffs from 25% to 50%. The stated goal was to revive domestic smelting. But since he first launched aluminum tariffs in 2018, one U.S. smelter has shut down and two more have gone idle. Not a single new smelter has broken ground. Why would they? Building one costs $4 to $6 billion and takes five years. And in an energy-intensive industry like ours, no company is going to make that bet without a long-term national strategy to produce lower-cost electricity.
Meanwhile, aluminum costs have spiked. The Midwest premium has nearly tripled this year, putting pressure on every industry that relies on aluminum, from automakers to aerospace suppliers. Customers are putting programs on hold. Costs are up. Demand is falling. We recently announced layoffs at our plants in Indiana and Iowa, the first time we’ve reduced headcount after a year of steady growth.
This is what a flawed policy looks like on the ground.
One of our customers in Florida builds power equipment for AI data centers. He approached us to reshore a casting program currently being produced in Canada. In theory, the tariffs should have made our offer more attractive. But when we submitted our quote, we couldn’t come close. The very tariffs meant to help us had raised input costs to the point that we were no longer competitive.
This is the complexity the current policy refuses to acknowledge. Manufacturing supply chains are deeply interconnected. You can’t bludgeon one link in the chain and expect the rest to fall into place.
Tariffs can be useful. But they are not a substitute strategy. What we need is a clear national industrial policy, one that identifies sectors vital to our economic and national security, and then supports them with targeted tools: public investment, tax credits, workforce development, R&D — and yes: tariffs, too.
At Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, we’ve expanded our capacity, acquired new capabilities and hired hundreds of workers in the past few years. We’re ready to keep investing. We need policymakers to match our seriousness. That means articulating long-term goals and creating the conditions for domestic industry to compete fairly, strategically and sustainably.
If even a company like ours, the supposed winner from tariffs, is struggling to find a benefit, it’s time to ask: Who, exactly, is this policy helping?"
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