"Brand Damage" From Trump's Tariffs

 

Trump's inane tariff trade war continues to take its toll:

Dr. Mike Lemmon's pigs, each valued between $2,500 and $5,000, were supposed to be on a plane bound for Hangzhou, China, from St. Louis in April, where’d they spend the flight snoring, play fighting and snacking on oats and husked corn before taking up residence at Chinese hog farms.

Instead, many went to a local Indiana slaughterhouse for less than $200 each after the Chinese buyer canceled the order within a week of China implementing retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. in April.

 

China is one of the biggest importers of American breeding pigs and other livestock genetic material such as cattle semen. These lucrative niche export markets had been growing, but dried up since U.S. President Donald Trump started a trade war with Beijing.

 

U.S. farmers and exporters said the dispute has already cost them millions of dollars and jeopardized prized trade relationships that took years to develop.

 

Though Washington and Beijing agreed to pause tariffs last week, exporters said Trump's unpredictable trade policy has caused their companies long-term damage and could encourage China and other major buyers to turn to foreign rivals like Denmark.

 

"We've got brand damage now. There's not a week that goes by without clients asking what’s happening with the U.S.," said Tony Clayton, owner of Clayton Agri-Marketing, a Missouri-based livestock exporting company.

 

"I don’t know how we can put this back together. This is long-term damage," he said... (our emphasis)

This story is being repeated all across rural America, as long- term relationships -- not just with China, but with other trading partners -- are broken, perhaps irretrievably, by the chaos of the Malignant Fascist's tariffs.  

 

We're not the indispensable nation the MF thinks we are;  in global trade, new partnerships are being forged without us, and in one area of American preeminence -- science and technology-- the MF is working hard to destroy our advantage over other countries while making us poorer and the world sicker.  What he is doing is clearing a path for China to overtake us as the world's biggest and most robust economy, while providing his handler Putin the greatest gift he could ever have imagined -- a backward- looking, friendless, weak America.

(Photo:  the incompetent moron with his tariff show-and-tell / Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)