China hugely reduced their purchases of soybeans, and Trump spent millions of dollars to placate US farmers, accomplishing nothing but forcing China to go to other countries and encourage them to build their markets to provide China with soybeans. China has never returned to its former level of purchases of US soybeans. Biden left Trump’s tariffs in place for reasons unknown to me, which Republicans repeated often to claim they were thus not bad. What was rarely reported was that Biden negotiated with China to increase its purchases of soybeans, a promise China did not fully live up to.
In 2018, Trump also slapped tariffs on some aluminum and steel imports. The EU retaliated by slapping a 25% tariff on some US goods, notably Kentucky bourbon. Kentucky voters are among the staunchest supporters of Trump and Republicans. The Democrats running in 2026 need to be running on economic issues like this because Trump’s tariffs will hurt many businesses. They cannot rely on the media, and never could really, to get any negative economic message out about Trump’s actions. Democrats will need to find other ways of communicating with voters in their local communities if necessary.
“The EU is one of our biggest markets for exporting bourbon. So that really hurt those tariffs beginning in 2018; took a huge, huge bite out of exports, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. For reference sake, in 2019, Kentucky had exported about $567 million worth of spirits and that’s of all categories of spirits; primarily, that’s going to be bourbon. But 567 million; by 2020, we were down to 390 million, and through a series of efforts and a lot of negotiation from a lot of interested parties, we were able to get those tariffs suspended. So, they still exist. They’re just suspended in suspended animation.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/possible-tariffs-worry-kentucky-distillers-about-future-of-bourbon/ar-AA1uitev
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