President Donald Trump is focused on exhorting GM not to shutter the Lordstown plant, where it makes the compact Chevrolet Cruze model. | Jeff Swensen/Getty Images Employment Trump faces failing strategy on auto jobs as he heads to Ohio As the president tries to save an auto plant in Ohio, his tariffs have cost automakers billions.

President Donald Trump heads to Ohio Wednesday embroiled in a fight with General Motors and the United Auto Workers over the closing of GM’s Lordstown plant. But his attempts to save manufacturing jobs have battered the auto industry and could erode his loyal base in the Midwest.

Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum have cost Ford and GM about $1 billion each. GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra cited the tariffs in November when she announced the 14,000 job cuts that included the Lordstown plant’s shuttering. Potentially making things even worse, Trump is now weighing new tariffs on foreign automobiles that could threaten hundreds of thousands of additional U.S. jobs.


“The reality is auto tariffs would put Ohio into a recession,” said Dan Ujczo, a Columbus-based international trade lawyer who has been closely studying the impact of recent trade actions on Ohio companies.

Ultimately, that could jeopardize Trump’s support in the Mahoning Valley and other blue-collar Great Lakes regions that voted for him in 2016.

“He’ll lose those the second he puts auto tariffs on,” Ujczo said. “These people understand you can’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” According to a Morning Consult tracking poll, Trump’s approval rating in Ohio has fallen 19 percentage points since January 2017.

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While Trump is focused on exhorting GM not to shutter the Lordstown plant, where it makes the compact Chevrolet Cruze model, the industry’s economic reality is much more complicated.

Trump’s simple formula of demanding that specific plants should stay open doesn’t account for the sophistication of the global auto industry. The auto making supply chain is global; foreign companies build cars in the U.S. but with some foreign-made parts. Likewise, cars made abroad often contain American parts. And automakers move workers from plant to plant as demand for different kinds of autos shifts.

GM says the Ohio plant is closing because demand has softened for the Cruze; the company says it is talking to workers about relocating to other facilities.

It’s unusual for any president — especially a Republican one — to tell private manufacturers how to run their businesses. “There’s a school of thought that these decisions are best left to the companies and the unions,” said Marick Masters, director of the labor studies program at Wayne State University in Detroit.

It's even more unusual for a president to blame a labor union for a plant closing. Dave Green, president of the United Auto Workers local at Lordstown, appears to have infuriated Trump Sunday when he said on Fox News that Trump's 2018 tax cut incentivized imports. Or perhaps Trump was irritated at Green for letting the press know in February that he'd written the president about the Lordstown closing in July 2018 and received no reply.

Whatever the specific provocation, Trump tweeted Sunday that "Democrat UAW Local 1112 President David Green ought to get his act together and produce," then followed up with a tweet that noted GM's Barra "blamed the UAW Union" for the shutdown, prompting an angry retort from the UAW: "Corporations close plants, workers don’t.”

Trump’s previous efforts to intervene in vehicle plant closings have resulted in tepid gains at best.

Trump lashed into Ford during the 2016 campaign for shipping jobs to Mexico, then claimed credit in early January 2017 when Ford, in an unrelated move, announced that it would create 700 jobs in Michigan to build electric and self-driving cars — while simultaneously expanding two plants in Mexico.

Trump was similarly irate in June 2018 when Harley-Davidson said it would offshore an unspecified number of jobs to offset the impact of European tariffs imposed in retaliation to Trump’s steel tariffs. Trump was so furious that he said he’d support a boycott of Harley-Davidson, prompting the company’s steepest sales drop in nearly a decade.

Trump’s protectionist policies are cutting into profits for automakers, even though they employ far more workers than the steel and aluminum industries the tariffs are designed to protect.

Overall, the auto and auto parts manufacturers in the United States employ more than a million workers, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By comparison, steel manufacturing employed roughly 81,000 workers in 2017, and workers in aluminum factories totaled nearly 13,000 the same year.

The U.S. aluminum industry has added only 100 jobs since the tariffs went into effect, while the steel industry increased employment by 6,200, according to the White House Economic Report of the President released Tuesday.

Trump’s visit Wednesday to the Joint Systems Manufacturing plant in Lima, Ohio, could prompt the president to reaffirm his national security rationale for steel and aluminum tariffs. That may be a good talking point at a factory that builds military tanks, but probably not at the Ford engine plant just up the road. Trump is using the same national security justification as he weighs tariffs on foreign automobiles and auto parts.

“Metal prices are the highest they are compared to anywhere else in the world where cars are made,” said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the nonprofit Center for Automotive research.

Supporters of Trump’s tariff policies say the actions are necessary to get long-term changes to China’s unfair trade practices and meaningful concessions from trade negotiations. Consistent job growth in the manufacturing sector is also fueling the argument by some that the tariffs are having a marginally favorable effect on the economy at large.

Still, uncertainty caused by steel and aluminum tariffs and the threat of auto tariffs has contributed to a steep decline in auto-industry investment since 2017, according to Dziczek. Average quarterly auto-industry investments fell to about $2 billion, after averaging nearly double that during President Barack Obama’s presidency.

Despite that, the foreign automakers who would be targeted by the tariffs are bolstering manufacturing in the U.S. with investments in auto plants across the Midwest and South.

While some companies like GM are shedding jobs, Fiat Chrysler last month announced plans to expand production of SUVs in Michigan, adding 6,500 jobs by 2021. Toyota announced last week said that it would increase investments in its U.S. operations with the addition of 600 new jobs by 2021.

Japanese car companies have increased U.S. employment by more than 27 percent since 2011, according to a recent study commissioned by the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association. That amounts to 92,000 American workers employed directly by Japanese companies and 355,000 workers employed by dealer networks.

Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corp., said the threat of tariffs on the basis of national security “really makes me sad.”

“Regardless of the direction we go, we will never leave the United States. We will stay here,” Toyoda said March 14 at an event hosted by The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

International trade makes it difficult to distinguish between what’s truly American and what’s truly foreign. An American-made Ford Fusion, observed Reed College economist Kimberly Clausing, is arguably less “American” than a Japanese-made Honda Accord, because only 20 percent of the Fusion’s parts are American made, compared to 80 percent of the Accord’s.

Even when 80 percent of a car’s component are American-made, the Michigan-based Center for Auto Research calculates, a 25 percent tariff on imported auto parts would increase by nearly 4 percent the price of a $35,000 car.

“Trump doesn't seem to understand that the automobile production process involves intensely global supply chains,” Clausing said.

Ian Kullgren contributed reporting.