Trump said the factories would come roaring back. He said it a lot — roaring back, coming back, bigger than ever. Seventy-two thousand manufacturing jobs gone since Liberation Day, and the Whirlpool plant in Iowa runs with 1,300 workers now. It had 3,000. The rest are in Mexico.
That’s the part nobody’s saying straight: the tariffs were supposed to stop companies from offshoring. Whirlpool heard that, did the math, and offshored anyway. John Deere took $300 million in tariff costs and handed out layoff notices in Illinois and Iowa. Because that’s how it works — the tariff hits the company first, the company passes it to consumers, and when consumers can’t absorb it anymore they just cut payroll. The workers who were supposed to be saved are eating the cost.
$1,500. That’s the average extra tax per American household this year. Not China paying that. Not the cheaters. You. The voter who got promised a factory job and got a higher grocery bill and a pink slip instead. The factories aren’t roaring. They’re in Mexico.