Whirlpool wrote the tariff playbook. The company lobbied Washington for appliance duties, praised them at every press event, and publicly backed Trump’s “Liberation Day” schedule because — on paper — it was supposed to kneecap LG and Samsung. Turns out the America First poster child just laid off 341 workers at its Amana, Iowa plant this spring, a plant that had 3,000 people in it five years ago. Union reps say it could be down to 500 by year’s end.
Where’s the work going? Mexico. Whirlpool poured over a billion dollars into Mexican facilities and tripled its workforce south of the border while the Iowa line shrinks to nothing. A company begged Washington for protection, got it, raised prices on every household in the country, and kept offshoring anyway. Which makes the tariffs exactly what every economist not on cable news said they’d be: a fridge tax that enriches the executives shipping those jobs to Guadalajara.
The Machinists rallied outside the gates. Good. The only version of this story that doesn’t end with Amana as a parking lot is the one where workers stop treating tariff-lovers like allies and start treating them like the landlords they actually are.