Well, all you slavish Trump devotees, now we get to see how protectionism plays out in the real world

LITD signaled the warning about this last Sunday.

Now it's for real. The Very Stable Genius announced today that he will impose a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum.

Nice work. The Dow immediately dropped 500 points.

The industries that produce those materials domestically think it's great, but the industries they supply  are pretty outraged.

“These proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports couldn't come at a worse time,” said Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association.

“The burden of these tariffs, as always, will be passed on to the American consumer,” Lusk said.

Brian Kuehl, executive director of Farmers for Free Trade, said the “announcement invites retaliation that we are deeply concerned will hurt American farmers.” 

“These tariffs are very likely to accelerate a tit-for-tat approach on trade, putting U.S. agricultural exports in the cross-hairs.” 

Roy Hardy, president of the Precision Metalforming Association and Dave Tilstone, president of the National Tooling and Machining Association, said the steep tariffs “imperils the U.S. manufacturing sector, and particularly downstream U.S. steel and aluminum consuming companies, who alone employ 6.5 million Americans compared to the 80,000 employed by the domestic steel industry.” 

“The tariffs will lead to the U.S. once again becoming an island of high steel prices resulting in our customers simply importing the finished part,” Hardy and Tilstone said.  

On the heels of the expressions of a desire for a gun grab, of disdain for due process, and contempt for his own attorney general, as well as a spike in the ongoing chaos at the White House, it's shaping up to be a quintessentially VSG week.