In May, when President Trump announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Canada and Mexico, Chris Pratt, the plant manager at Mid-Continent Nail, the largest nail manufacturer in the U.S., was caught in a bind. Poplar Bluff, Missouri, Mid-Continent’s home, is a sprawling town of seventeen thousand on the eastern edge of the Ozarks, a two-and-a-half-hour drive south of St. Louis. It’s a quiet place and notably conservative. Flags are everywhere, including on the boxes Mid-Continent uses to ship its nails. When a local lawyer recently started a public radio station, in the basement of a dentist’s office, he chose not to air any NPR programming, in part to avoid offending the station’s board members. In 2016, nearly eighty per cent of the county went for Trump. “Did I like the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’?” Pratt said to me. “I sure did.”

And yet the President’s shoot-first, ask-questions-later economic policies have already cost the town hundreds of jobs. Since the tariffs were implemented, in June, the price of imported steel has risen by twenty-five per cent. Mid-Continent, which had to raise its prices on nails nearly as much, soon lost half of its orders and had to let go of almost half its workforce. If they don’t get any relief, Pratt has said, the factory will likely close. “It’s been devastating,” he told me. “Never did I think when Trump campaigned on ‘Make America Great Again’ we’d have to lay off all these people.”

Mid-Continent’s unexpected role in Trump’s trade wars highlights the tangled knots of the global economy. Before 2012, the firm was owned by two local brothers, who sold it to Deacero, a Mexican steel manufacturer (also owned by brothers), which now supplies Mid-Continent with the wire needed to make nails. When Pratt learned of the sale, he worried that the Mexican firm would close the Poplar Bluff factory and move the jobs there south of the border. But the new owners made a commitment to continue making nails in the U.S. In the next six years, the number of employees at Mid-Continent more than doubled, from two hundred and forty-seven to five hundred and seven. Last December, at the factory’s Christmas party, Pratt was feeling so optimistic about the future that he announced hopes to grow to a thousand employees. Matthew Slaughter, the dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told me, “It belies the simple narrative that there are American companies and there are foreign companies, that someone wins and someone loses.”

Pratt’s effort to save his company—and the jobs of his employees, many of whom are friends—has prompted appearances on NPR, Fox News, and other media outlets. In July, he told a reporter for the Washington Post, “We’re in a situation where we’re fighting against our own country.” He has also met with members of Congress, U.S. senators, and even the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross. Pratt—who’s fifty-two, wears his hair in a bowl cut, and usually comes to work in jeans and a company polo shirt—describes himself as “a small-town country boy.” He is easygoing and speaks in a southern twang, without guile, which I suspect leads some to underestimate him. The company’s publicist, James Glassman, who is based in Washington, D.C., confided that, when he learned that Pratt would be the point person in talking with Ross, “I was concerned.”

Ross has stood firmly behind Trump’s belief that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” In March, Ross appeared on CNBC holding a can of Campbell’s soup, a prop he used to suggest that the tariffs would not have a deleterious effect on American manufacturing. “What I’d like to do,” Ross said into the camera, “is to emphasize again the limited impact. This is a can of Campbell’s soup. In the can of Campbell’s soup, there’s about 2.6 cents’—2.6 pennies’—worth of steel. So, if that goes up by twenty-five per cent, that’s about six-tenths of one cent on the price of a can of Campbell’s soup. . . . Well, I just bought this can today, at a 7-Eleven down here, and the price was $1.99. So who in the world is going be bothered by six-tenths of a cent?” Two months later, Campbell’s declared that the tariffs would directly affect their bottom line, and announced that they expected a profit decline of between five and six per cent in the upcoming year.

Of course, for a nail manufacturer like Mid-Continent, steel is everything. As a last-ditch effort, in June, Mid-Continent submitted a request to the Department of Commerce to be excluded from Trump’s tariffs. It’s not the only company to do so. Christine McDaniel, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, at George Mason University, said the Commerce Department estimated that it would receive roughly forty-five hundred exclusion requests from companies that import steel; instead, it has been deluged with more than thirty-five thousand applications, from nearly eight hundred firms. (Companies file individual requests for different types of steel.)