Cleveland-Cliffs is shutting mills in Pennsylvania and Illinois and putting 950 more steelworkers on the street at the end of June. That’s on top of the 1,200 they already cut in March. Seventh straight losing quarter, $225 million torched last quarter alone, and CEO Lourenco Goncalves — the guy who spent 2025 on cable news cheerleading Trump’s steel tariffs as the savior of American industry — wants you to know that next quarter is going to be great. Trust him.
Here’s the thing the brain trust never figured out: tariffs only save steel if someone still buys the steel. Cars cost more now, auto demand cratered, and the mills have nothing to roll. Cliffs’ Canadian plant is getting smoked by a 50% tariff on the steel it ships south, because nobody in Washington noticed that Cliffs owns the plant on both sides of the border. The whole tariff-buoyed industry is eating its own supply chain alive while the guys who drafted the policy take a victory lap.
The people in Conshohocken and Steelton and Riverdale are the ones losing their mortgages. Not Goncalves. Not Trump. The guys who were told they’d be winners. Same pattern every single time — they promise you a boom, they hand you a pink slip, and then the guy who broke it goes on cable news to explain how the next quarter is going to be huge.