With the Kentucky governor's race just nine days away and both Donald Trump and Mike Pence headed here to shore up support for GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, it's important to note that nobody has done more damage to Kentucky's manufacturing sector than Trump himself, whose tariffs are now collapsing the commodities market and closing the state's last few steel mills.
Brenda Deborde cried throughout her 16-hour shift at the steel plant here when she received official notice this August that her job was being cut.
Deborde had hoped President Trump’s tariffs could revive this once-mighty mill on a bank of the Ohio River, which for much of the 20th century formed the center of economic life in this part of Eastern Kentucky.
She and her husband, Matt, had traveled to welcome the president as he went to a rally in nearby Huntington, W.Va., waving their Trump flag and “Make America Great Again” hat to the motorcade from the side of the road.
“We really thought the tariffs were going to turn us around — that things would go back to being the way it was. We thought it could be a kind of saving grace,” said Deborde, 58.
It wasn’t. By the end of this year, she and Matt will lose their jobs at the plant after almost two decades. They aren’t sure what they will do next.
Last year, Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to try to boost domestic production. It appeared to work, briefly, sending company stock prices higher and leading to more hiring and production.
But that boost now appears short-lived. The industry faces strong head winds threatening to undermine one of the president’s central economic promises ahead of his 2020 reelection campaign.
The stocks of the biggest steel companies — which also rose dramatically when the tariffs first came on — have similarly tumbled over the past year, in some cases by more than 50 percent.
They have been hurt by tepid domestic demand for steel production amid a U.S. manufacturing recession and a global slowdown in economic growth, among other things.
And there are Democrats out here in rural Kentucky who voted for Clinton and prayed the tariffs would save them.
They didn't.
“Everybody here was so excited. I don’t like Trump, but I really thought they would help,” said Kilgore, 48, a union leader who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “Now, I see they didn’t.”
The steelworkers in Ashland, including several who voted for Clinton, do not blame Trump for the closure of the plant. Most said they were grateful that the White House imposed the tariffs, which they considered long overdue, to stem the oversupply of steel in the market from foreign producers. Several believe Trump should have gone further and issued even stricter levies on steel imports.
But many also said that their experience gave them insight into the limits of tariffs for the average worker. Jack Young, a Trump supporter who has worked for 20 years as a pipe fitter at the plant, will lose his job next month. Young requires medication for several heart conditions that costs $6,000 a month and does not know how he will afford it once his health insurance is terminated.
“The tariffs — we thought they’d bring some life back,” Young said. “But they just raised the price of steel.”
Now the price of steel has collapsed to pre-tariff levels, and is continuing to collapse as the global economy is tipping into recession. Nucor's new steel plant is now being delayed. AK Steel is going under after decades, finished off by Donald Trump's greed and an economic downturn made possible by a tax cut package last year that gave trillions to the rich and left devastation in its wake for the other 90% of us.
This is what Trump did to Kentucky.
We can help change that in nine days.
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