Donald Trump is not backing down on his trade war with China—and China is very serious about making it hurt Trump politically by hurting his supporters economically. Data from the Brookings Institution shows “that China has taken aggressive steps to sharpen its targeting of Trump counties in the latest round of retaliatory tariffs it just announced,” Greg Sargent writes. More than a million of the jobs in industries that will be hit with Chinese tariffs are in 2,173 counties that voted for Trump, while just over 560,000 of the jobs are in 444 counties that voted for Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t look like an accident:
The rub here, [Brookings senior fellow Mark] Muro tells me, is that China’s new retaliatory tariffs actually go further in targeting red counties than its previously threatened list did. “These tariffs will touch down in very specific places,” Muro said. “They appear calculated to have that effect. In its final iteration the list became significantly more rural and agricultural and red.”
It’s sometimes said that this trade war might have a negligible effect on the U.S. economy overall. But Muro points out to me that, by targeting industries that are particularly important in their geographic areas, the tariffs could have outsize impact in concentrated localities. “These counties rely pretty heavily on these industries,” Muro says. “Certain places could be hit quite hard.” Red places, to be precise.
Trump’s most avid base is likely to find a way to rationalize that as they’ve rationalized so much else that would seem to be against their interests or values. But economic damage to his supporters is unlikely to help Trump, at a minimum. And it will intensify the conflict within the Republican Party over his trade war, which many Republican lawmakers are already unhappy about. The problem is the pain it will inflict in the mean time.