If you want to know what tariffs actually protect, look at Whirlpool. This is the company that spent years lobbying for them — it got Trump to slap a 20% levy on imported washing machines back in 2018 because LG and Samsung were eating its lunch. Whirlpool wrote the playbook everyone’s running now: tax the foreign stuff, save the American factory, bring the jobs home. And in 2026, with that exact policy back in full force, Whirlpool is laying off 341 people at its plant in Amana, Iowa and moving the work to Mexico. A second round of cuts is already on the calendar for later this year.
Five years ago that Amana plant ran on more than 3,000 workers. It’s down to about 1,200 now, and the machinists union figures it could bottom out around 500 once Whirlpool finishes the job. In April of last year Trump stood up and promised “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” His first year in office, the country shed 83,000 manufacturing jobs. The factories aren’t roaring back. They’re being quietly forklifted across the border by the same companies that asked for the tariff in the first place — Whirlpool’s been lobbying to keep the duties on its competitors while begging for an exemption on the parts its own American plants need to run.
That’s the whole con in one company. Tariffs were never built to protect the guy on the line in Amana — they protect the margin on the spreadsheet, and once the margin’s fat enough the company takes it and leaves anyway. The worker eats the higher prices as a shopper and the pink slip as an employee, and gets called an “America First” success story on the way out the door. Whirlpool got everything it asked Washington for. Ask the 341 people in Iowa how protected they feel.