According to the United States International Trade Commission, other serious consequences of the tariffs included difficulties obtaining steel in the quality and quantity desired, a shift to sourcing finished parts from overseas, and relocating domestic steel-consuming facilities abroad.

Does that sound like what’s best for American workers and consumers? Instead of bringing jobs back to America and fighting off imports, the tariffs led to more jobs shipped abroad and more imports of final, rather than raw, goods. In other words, if your company uses steel to make pipes or refrigerators, you may decide to simply produce your own products abroad rather than paying artificially inflated prices on steel in order to make them in the U.S.A.

Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, recently reminded the president of the negative impact of the 2002 import taxes. Mr. Trump dismissed it as a byproduct of the Bush administration’s incompetence. But this president doesn’t have the power to change the laws of economics.

Like President Bush, Mr. Trump will raise the cost of doing business in steel- and aluminum-consuming companies. In turn, it will make life much harder for the 6.5 million workers those industries employ. Many will lose their jobs — possibly more than the 170,000 workers currently employed in the steel and aluminum producing industries.

Adding insult to injury, the president is comfortable with the knowledge that his import tax will make our cars, infrastructure, soda cans and aircraft more expensive. And he’s flat-out wrong when he claims, “Maybe it’ll cost a little bit more, but we’ll have jobs.” As the Department of Commerce’s own report shows, the decline of jobs in the steel and aluminum industries predates the competition with China by decades. Industry experts know that this is mostly because of innovation and industry consolidation. The era of labor-intensive metal production is over.

And Mr. Trump may think a tariff-induced trade war would reduce our trade deficits, as he gleefully tweeted the day after the announcement, but don’t count on it. In the unlikely event that the import tax would incentivize foreign companies to set up shop in the United States, these investments would very likely increase the United States trade deficit. It would prompt foreigners to buy fewer American exports in order to accumulate the dollars needed to fund these investments.