THE FIRST LAYOFFS FROM TRUMP’S TARIFFS ARE HERE
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ president warns
The first casualties of President Donald Trump’s trade war are 60 workers at Mid-Continent Nail, America’s largest nail manufacturer. They lost their jobs on June 15 at a factory in a part of Missouri that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The whole company, which has 500 employees, could be out of business by Labor Day.
The Trump administration has argued that new tariffs will save jobs and that the cost to America will be minor.
But On Monday, Harley-Davidson said it will be moving some “production” offshore because of the trade war (Europe hit Harley with a 31 percent tariff in response to Trump’s steel tariffs on Europe). Harley won’t confirm if jobs are leaving the United States.
President Donald Trump warned Rep. Maxine Waters on Monday to “be careful what you wish for,” offering a provocative rebuke to the California Democrat who has called for the continuing public harassment of Trump administration officials.
Taking to Twitter, Trump called Waters “an extraordinarily low IQ person” — a moniker he has bestowed on her before — and cautioned that he has a massive movement behind him.
“She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement,” Trump wrote. “Be careful what you wish for Max!”
Waters, who has represented various Southern California districts in Congress since 1991, leaned into her more recent role as a leader of the anti-Trump resistance over the weekend, earning widespread condemnation as she called for the public to “absolutely harass” Trump’s Cabinet officials on the streets, lest they help their boss turn the presidency into a dictatorship.
“The American people have put up with this president long enough. What more do we need to see? What more lies do we need to hear?” Waters shouted at a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them!”
Her comments came a day after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant. Sanders’s aborted dinner party followed spontaneous street protests against other Trump aides and allies, including Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who left a Mexican restaurant to cries of “Shame!” last week.
The flash mobs are inspired, in particular, by the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy on undocumented migrants, whom Trump said should be stripped of their due-process rights.
But Waters’s indignation encompasses the entire Trump presidency — not just what he’s done, but who she says he is.
“He loves the strongmen and the dictators of the world because he wants to be just like them. He wants to run the country like them,” the congresswoman told MSNBC on Sunday, a day after her rally.
“And I want to tell you,” she said, “for these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, to be able to stop at a gas station, to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them until they tell the president: ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’”
Her call to drive Trump officials from public life has made her a hero to many on the left — and has disturbed not only Trump supporters but some moderates and Democrats who accuse her of hastening the country’s descent from centuries-old civic standards.