Trump’s Extreme Tariffs Have Already Hit the Auto Industry

American companies are not “leaping” to hire new employees, as the White House promised. Instead, they’re rapidly letting them go.

Stellantis—one of the Big Three automakers in the U.S.—announced Thursday that it would be laying off hundreds of U.S. workers in the wake of Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs. The company is also planning to temporarily pause production at two foreign assembly plants in Canada and Mexico.

“We are continuing to assess the medium- and long-term effects of these tariffs on our operations, but also have decided to take some immediate actions, including temporarily pausing production at some of our Canadian and Mexican assembly plants,” Chief Operating Officer Antonio Filosa told employees in an email on Thursday.

Some 900 U.S.-based employees are expected to be laid off at Stellantis’s Warren Stamping and Sterling Stamping plants in Michigan, as well as three of its transmission and casting plants in Indiana.

Speaking with CBS earlier Thursday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had claimed that “people are going to start building factories right now” and that companies will “employ Americans today.”

“Factories rebuilding, all the ships are going to be running hot across America now; you’re going to see employment leaping starting today,” Lutnick said.

But Lutnick’s insistence on following Trump’s tariff plan has veered totally into the delusional. In an interview with CNN the same day, Lutnick implored voters and investors to “let Donald Trump run the global economy,” promising that Trump would cut deals “if and only if these countries can change everything about themselves.”

Wall Street analysts have predicted bad news for automakers and their investors as they attempt to navigate Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles and auto parts, which took effect Thursday. In the near term, that will look like increased market volatility and shaken supply chains.

While there are vehicles that are assembled in America, there are no vehicles in the U.S. that are made entirely with domestic products and labor. Instead, producing a car or a truck requires thousands of parts that are sourced from the global supply chain—an international relationship that Trump’s tariffs will undoubtedly hurt.

“We stress that the concept of a U.S. car maker with parts all from the U.S. is a fictional tale that does not exist and would take years to make this concept a reality,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in an investor note Wednesday obtained by CNBC.

Multiple National Security Council staffers have been fired at the behest of MAGA conspiracy theorist and Trump loyalist Laura Loomer, according to Axios and the Associated Press.

The NSC, headed by Mike Waltz, made headlines after Signalgate, in which Waltz inadvertently added The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat where multiple Cabinet members were discussing plans to bomb Yemen.

A source close to the situation told Axios that the firings were “being labeled as an anti-neocon move.” Waltz has been accused of being insufficiently MAGA by the farthest right of the party.

Loomer apparently “presented [Trump] with her research and evidence” alleging that more traditional neoconservative foreign policy hawks were too well represented in the administration.

Loomer, who Trump has described as a “free spirit,” is a “proud Islamophobe” who was pushed out of Trump’s inner circle during the campaign due to numerous statements that were deemed too incendiary for MAGA. She’s stated that 9/11 was an “inside job” and that the White House would “smell like curry” if Kamala Harris, who is of Indian descent, won the election.

This may be the worst time to allow a crank like Loomer back into the fold. The Signalgate controversy has already demonstrated the administration’s capacity for foolishness, and relationships with the rest of the world are arguably at an all-time low, thanks to Trump’s suicidal tariff regimen.

Loomer has declined to share any of what she discussed in her Oval Office meeting.

Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary during Donald Trump’s first term, is worried about the president’s new tariffs and hoping to change them via the president’s favorite medium: television.

On CNBC Thursday morning, Mnuchin tried to delicately ask for carve-outs and concessions, attempting to explain that “there’s a transition period here that needs to be adjusted to.

“It’s the larger tariffs that are called the reciprocal tariffs. I’m hopeful that those will be negotiated down, that those will bring people to the table, that those will be negotiated down. For many businesses, it takes a while to move the manufacturing base,” Mnuchin said.

“I hope the president will consider giving people credits for those people who have made real commitments, not just announcements, but real commitments, to build in the U.S,” added the longtime investment banker.

Mnuchin is not on bad terms with Trump or the administration, but it’s telling that he’s willing to point out some of the obvious flaws in Trump’s half-baked economic plan. And only last month he said that “people are overreacting a bit” to the administration’s policy changes.

“I don’t think we’re going to have a recession. I don’t think the outlook looks like we’re going to have a recession. And Larry Summers saying there’s a 50 percent probability, I just don’t agree with that,” Mnuchin said on CNBC at the time, referring to comments from another former Treasury head. The interview is a window into the way Mnuchin, who was widely seen as one of the “adults in the room” during his first term, likely approached the president when he served as his treasury secretary: as a toddler.

While Mnuchin didn’t mention a recession in Thursday’s interview, it’s clear he’s now worried about Trump’s actions and is hoping that, from behind a TV screen, Trump might see some sense with a very mild recommendation. Maybe he should be overreacting now.

In the topsy-turvy world of the Trump administration, market panic and financial suffering are somehow good things.

The president unveiled his economic agenda on Wednesday, revealing steep tariff hikes on practically every country in the world—regardless of whether the U.S. is running a trade deficit or surplus there.

The news sent markets reeling. But by Thursday morning, Donald Trump was still celebrating his plan.

“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

But it’s unclear what metrics—if any—Trump used to measure his success.

In reality, American businesses were seriously disturbed. The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by 1,500 points, about 3.5 percent, while the S&P 500 sank by 3.9 percent, setting both on pace for their worst day since the 2022 inflation crisis. The Nasdaq Composite tanked by more than 5 percent—bringing it down by 17 percent from its all-time high and down 13 percent year-to-date, the index’s worst performance since March 2020.

Stock futures similarly plummeted. The value of the U.S. dollar dropped, and the price for a troy ounce of gold skyrocketed.

Overnight, some of the country’s most competitive companies lost hundreds of billions of dollars. Nike and Lululemon, whose business models rely on international manufacturing deals in China and Vietnam, each lost more than 10 percent. Big-box stores also saw prominent losses: Best Buy, Target, and Home Depot lost 5 percent.

The tech industry was similarly shaken: Apple was down 9 percent (worth approximately $300 billion in market value), Alphabet by 4 percent, Amazon by 7 percent, Meta by 7 percent, Microsoft by 3 percent, and Nvidia by 6 percent.

Stores that rely heavily on imported goods saw their stocks tank too. Five Below lost 29 percent, Dollar Tree fell by 8 percent, and the Gap suffered a 22 percent loss.

“The macro does not make sense, but the level of chaos and uncertainty, coupled with revaluing highly overpriced stocks, is hitting hard,” assessed CNBC analyst Ron Insana on Thursday.

In a note to investors, JP Morgan said that Trump’s tariffs had a 40 percent chance of slingshotting the U.S. economy into a recession. JP Morgan underscored that the tariffs would cause a price surge—adding 2 percent to the consumer price index—and additionally raise taxes on Americans by $660 billion a year, “the largest tax increase in recent memory by a long shot,” reported CNN.

“The impact on inflation will be substantial,” the analysts said, according to CNN. “We view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macroeconomic shock.”

A judge has ordered the Trump administration to release a man whom it wrongly detained and planned to deport to El Salvador.

In a brief one-page filing overnight Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Rolando Olvera ordered that the government not only release Adrian Gil Rojas but that it buy him a ticket from Brownsville, Texas, back to New York.

“The Court holds that the Petitioner is a Venezuelan national with a valid Temporary Protected Status and was wrongfully detained,” Olvera wrote.

“The Court further holds that Respondents produced no evidence that Petitioner is a danger to the public,” he added.

The government had argued that it should be allowed to detain and deport Gil Rojas because his TPS was set to expire on April 2, but his lawyer insisted that he was in the process of reopening his immigration case and that there was reason to believe that the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal TPS would fail.

The lawyer was right: On Monday, a San Francisco judge blocked the government from revoking the protected status of about 350,000 Venezuelans. Judge Edward Chen slammed Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem for making “sweeping negative generalizations about Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries.”

“Acting on the basis of a negative group stereotype and generalizing such stereotype to the entire group is the classic example of racism,” Chen said in his order.

Gil Rojas, who said that he was arrested in New York last month, had been one of dozens of Venezuelan nationals detained by ICE who were sneakily moved closer and closer to an airfield in Harlingen, Texas, where the government staged a mass deportation to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador.

On March 14, the plane that was supposed to take Gil Rojas suffered a mechanical issue and was rescheduled for the following day, giving his lawyer enough time to get Olvera to issue an order blocking his immediate removal. Gil Rojas was spared, unlike the dozens of others for whom due process was suspended under Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law he has reappropriated to aid in his mass deportation efforts.

Olvera said that when Gil Rojas was returned to New York, he should be released on his own recognizance, and recommended that he wear an ankle monitor while his immigration case was pending.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration admitted that it had wrongly deported Kilmer Armado Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had been granted protected status from being sent back to El Salvador. The government blamed an “administrative error,” and a judge ruled that the man could not be returned to the U.S. because the court lacked jurisdiction now that he was out of U.S. custody.

Evidence that the government expedited the deportation of individuals who, as Olvera put it, were not a “danger to the public” only continues to mount. The government revealed that it had heavily relied on the tattoos to identify members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the U.S. government has deemed a terrorist group, for deportation. But experts on the gang say that there are no tattoos that signify TdA affiliation.