Meanwhile, Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro continues to be the floundering trade war's cheerleader-in-chief. In a recent op-ed in USA Today, Navarro declared that the metals tariffs had helped working-class American families: No president has done more to defend the American manufacturing base…than Donald J. Trump…No president…has done more to lift the prospects of low- and moderate-income families than President Trump, he wrote. Loading As evidence for this unfounded claim, Navarro cites examples of recent factory openings -- an aluminum mill and a smelter in Kentucky, and steel mills in Missouri and Oklahoma. Having named a handful of such successes, Navarro declares his case proven. There are several reasons why this is terribly weak evidence in favor of a tariff-driven manufacturing revival. First, there are no aggregate numbers - it's possible that all the examples Navarro mentioned, even when combined, are nothing more than a drop in the bucket relative to the vast American economy.

Second, Navarro doesn't compare this supposed flurry of activity to the regular background level of aluminum- and steel-plant openings and closings. At any given moment, there are probably plans for a number of such plants to be opened in the country -- thus, it would usually be easy to claim a burst of activity simply by identifying some of the openings and ignoring the closings. A quick Google search verifies this. Searching for "aluminum mill opening" and "aluminum plant opening," and limiting the search to 2015 or earlier, I quickly found several hits. There was a story about Alcoa opening the world's largest aluminum-lithium aerospace plant in Indiana in 2014 and another article about a $US300 million ($391 million) expansion at an Alcoa plant in Tennessee in 2015. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. A 2015 story in Area Development reported: Loading "Over the past two years, some 40 companies have announced aluminum-related projects in Kentucky, which has led to nearly $US735 million in new investment…Aleris in Lewisport…has announced a $US350 million expansion of its rolling mill." So there were 40 aluminum-related projects in two years, in Kentucky alone, and before Trump was president. Compared to that, the handful of projects Navarro names seem insignificant. Doubtless the same is true for steel.

And it's not just plant openings that are always happening in the background -- some are always closing. Searching for "aluminum mill closing" and "aluminum plant closing" since Trump took office, I quickly found a story from December 2017 about Alcoa shutting an aluminum smelter in Texas, another from January 2018 about Real Alloy closing a plant in Michigan, and other similar stories. Navarro and other Trump defenders might retort that the president's tariffs had not yet taken effect, but that's beside the point. With plant openings and closings part of the regular background noise of the US metals industry, picking out a few examples of the former proves absolutely nothing. US carmakers are incensed with Trump's moves. Credit:AP The third reason Navarro's defense of the tariffs doesn't hold water is that the aluminum and steel industries aren't the only ones affected by the import taxes. Lots of US manufacturers use aluminum and steel to make other things, including automobiles. Tariffs make those metals more expensive, which might boost the bottom lines of aluminum and steel makers, but which will hurt lots of other manufacturing industries. There are signs this is already happening. American factory input prices keep rising.

Meanwhile, automakers and auto-parts manufacturers -- the same industry Trump is proposing to protect with a different set of tariffs - are incensed, as are American manufacturers in many other industries. Faced with higher prices for steel and aluminum parts, many American factories are looking to source more from overseas -- exactly the opposite of what Trump and Navarro want. In other words, the harm from Trump's ill-advised trade war won't just come from retaliation by other countries. US tariffs will directly harm American manufacturers, no matter what other countries do. Navarro seems not to realize this at all - it's as if he thinks that the impact of a steel tariff can be measured by looking only at the steel industry. That's a basic, simple economics mistake - and it wouldn't be Navarro's first. Advised by cheerleaders like Navarro, Trump continues to blindly, confidently stumble toward inevitable disaster. Our president's belligerence has not been matched with intelligence. Sadly, it's the American factory worker and the American consumer who will have to suffer for it. Bloomberg