If I'm not mistaken, the steel industry is a big union shop. Imagine the union votes Trump will pick up from laid off steel workers in Ohio and Pennsylvania who get to go back to work as the result of this.
I heard an interview yesterday morning on the radio with Lindsay Graham who said that the majority of tires in America are made in South Carolina and that the steel that is used in the steel belts of the tires is a special type that has to be imported. How did we ever allow us to get in the position where we can't provide the steel needed to produce tires? Trump was right when he recently said if you don't have steel, you don't have a country.
We got in this position by letting other countries with cheap labor and no environmental or government restrictions dump their products here. Some countries sell at a no profit or loss to gain a share as well.
Another problem was all the leveraged buyouts in the 80's and 90's that left manufacturers in deep debt and forced them to out source production over seas.
Trump is trying to right decades of piss poor decisions by businesses and government. I really believe he knows how to bring back manufecturing / jobs and rebuild out economy.
Manufacturing , turning raw materials into finished goods is the key to real financial success and stability.
Bad decisions by unions, businesses, and governments (local, state, federal) along with various other trends (e.g. automation) have brought us to the brink.
One of the worst was the Clinton Administration's give-aways in the 1990's, letting greedy companies sell our technology to the Chinese:
...Putting aside stubborn differences on human rights and democratic reform, President Bill Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin today announced a pact aimed at halting the spread of nuclear weapons and giving China access to U.S. nuclear power plant technology.
After 2 1/2 hours of talks with the Chinese leader, Clinton told a news conference he intends to certify China as not exporting nuclear technology for weapons development by other countries, a move that also clears the way for U.S. companies to sell nuclear power technology to the Chinese.
"This agreement is a win-win-win," Clinton said. "It serves America's national security, environmental and economic interests ... It is the right thing to do for America."
(My emphasis above)
"
NO!!!" I screamed at the time. (Imagine
Charlton Heston's cry at the end of
Planet of the Apes.) Sure, let's put aside that China is at heart a Communist slave-state, no matter how capitalistic it might seem to those slavering to make a quick buck at the expense of "free-trading" America into a corner of mediocrity and blackmail.
See:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/10/29/china.summit/ And then we had missile technology transfers at the same time when the Pentagon had determined that previous Chinese access to our technology
"had increased the accuracy of China's ballistic missile arsenal" !!! See the article below:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/11/world/clinton-approves-technology-transfer-to-china.html