Thirty-five billion dollars. That’s how much Trump’s auto tariffs have cost carmakers so far, and guess who’s eating it? Not the CEOs — their margins slid from 8% to 4% and they passed the rest straight to you. Sticker prices on imports from Canada, Japan, Germany, and Mexico are up thousands of dollars. The average American household is paying $1,500 more per year in tariff costs across the board. This was supposed to bring manufacturing home. A year in, automakers still don’t even know which tariffs are staying. Real stable policy environment you’ve built there, guys.
The Supreme Court already struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February because they were, and I cannot stress this enough, illegal. But the administration just pivoted to a new 10% global tariff under a different legal authority like a kid caught cheating on a test who immediately pulls out a different cheat sheet. Steel and aluminum duties are still at 41%. Auto parts tariffs are expanding in April. The working people who actually build these cars — in Detroit, in Ontario, in Nagoya — are watching their jobs get squeezed so a billionaire can play economic nationalist on Truth Social. This isn’t a trade policy. It’s a $35 billion vanity project and you’re the one paying for it.