Now that the Trump trade wars are underway we can start the grisly task of counting the casualties. And in Texas, they will be counted among the blue collar ranks of the steel workers, the roughnecks, the oil refinery hard hats, the farmers and, yes, the cowboys.

To a lot of people, international trade debate can sound an awful lot like Charlie Brown's teacher. But it's not. It's about government intervening in capitalism and picking winners and losers. And in President Donald Trump's hypocritical brand of billionaire populism, he may say all the right things to blue collar Americans — about being tough, about shaking things up — even as he turns them into economic losers.

Texas has a lot to lose in a trade war with China even as one with Europe and six others over steel and aluminum is temporarily stayed by Trump suddenly granting temporary exemptions.

Guess who imports more steel than any other state in the U.S.? It's not some Rustbelt economy like Ohio or Indiana. No, it's Texas.

Bales of raw steel imports sit in an outdoor storage yard at the Insteel Industries factory in Houston, March 2, 2018. President Donald Trump is expected to formally sign off on stiff and sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum imports at noon on March 8, according to people familiar with the deliberations. (TODD SPOTH / NYT)

Texas represents more than $8 billion and 17 percent of the country's steel and aluminum imports, according to the Brookings Institution. That steel in Texas goes into oil field equipment, pipelines, building construction, Toyota Tundra trucks and fighter planes, much of it concentrated in and around Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth.

Now, manufacturers will just pay more — either in higher prices domestically or high taxes to the federal government.

If you didn't know that Texas imported more steel than, say, California or Ohio, that's OK; most people also don't know about the 68,000 steel-working jobs in Texas that pay about $50,000 yearly, according to the industry. Those steel jobs not clustered around the state's two largest cities are scattered across East Texas, just as they have been since the 1870s. And yes, the steel products that Texas exports to Europe are on the hit list for retaliatory tariffs.

Also at the top of the list: rice farmers. Like steel, you may not think of Texas and rice in the same sentence, but you would be sorely mistaken. We're one of the top 10 rice-producing states in the country, most of it grown on the hot, humid coastal plain around Houston. Other southern states, namely Arkansas and Louisiana, will also be big losers in a trade war with Europe.

For a while now, rice farmers, like a lot of U.S. farmers, have been looking to foreign markets to lift their sagging price fortunes; they produce more than the domestic market will profitably bear, despite increases in the amount of rice Americans consume. But they can forget about it. Not only are the Europeans set to immediately retaliate against their grain, but Europe just got access to the market with China.

In this Sept. 20, 2011 file photo, rancher and farmer Victor Corporon looks over a pump which carries water from the Colorado River to his farm and catfish ponds in Palacios, Texas. Corporon and his wife Barbara depend on water from the Colorado River to raise catfish and to grow rice, a staple of their farm near the Texas coast. (David J. Phillip / AP)

The big kahuna here is China, upon which Trump plans to levy some $60 billion in tariffs. Not only are U.S. rice farmers at risk, but so are cattle ranchers; they had just gotten access to the Chinese market, too. In less than a year, China has become the No. 10 export market for U.S. beef, according to a report in Farm Talk Newspaper, and exports were expected to grow.

Japan and South Korea are on the steel tariff hit list and are among the major importers of U.S. beef. The fact is that now the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans can get their beef from the Argentinians, Australians and Brazilians. Unsure of the future of NAFTA, according to a report in the Atlantic, Mexico has begun buying Argentinian beef and Brazilian grain. But the biggest Texas exports to China? Not beef or grain.

There are far more valuable petrochemical products. A lot has been made of the centrality of NAFTA to the economy of Texas; and it's mostly true. But China is our third-largest export market for goods. We sell them oil and gas, chemicals, resins and synthetic fibers, semiconductors and heavy machinery, according to the U.S.-China Business Council.

A few things are abundantly clear. One is that Trump is not interested in being president of the United States; he is the president of the Rustbelt Midwest. That runs roughly down through Appalachia into the northern tier of the South. If you look at a concentration of his popular vote on an electoral map, it becomes abundantly clear. But his representation of this region is mostly just talk, a billionaire posturing as a populist.

Unfortunately, that's the game of a pied piper. The American steel industry wasn't decimated by unfair trade; it fell victim beginning in the 1970s to more efficient, cheaper technology, namely from Japan. And the Trump administration is doing nothing about technological innovation or automation in industry. The jobs he promised? They're never coming back to Ohio or Indiana or Alabama. Never.

But, to his political credit, Trump has proven adept at conning people into voting against their economic self-interest. And that's true in Texas, too. Now, the steel worker, the roughneck, the refinery hard hat, the cowboy and the farmer here in Texas will all pay the price since the con man came to town.

Richard Parker is a writer in Austin and the author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America. He is a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @richardparkertx

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