Over the past year, it’s been stunning to see President Trump’s core base, the 30% or so of Americans who are rapidly sliding rightwards on the blood-and-soil scale, weather every scandal, every damning bombshell, and every foreseeable and self-inflicted failure with an impenetrable stubbornness.
It seemed like there was nothing that couldn’t be explained away as “fake news” or a (((conspiracy))) by George Soros and the Clinton machine, no statement too crude or lie too brazen to be shrugged aside by his baying and hooting fans – until now.
The president’s impulsive and reckless imposition of tariffs on the majority of our trading partners as part of some ill-conceived crusade to punish other nations for largely imaginary inequalities in our trade relationships is having the expected results of driving business and jobs away from America – and that just might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Bavarian Motor Works, more famously known as BMW, has just announced that they will be moving a large portion of their SUV production to China, where Brilliance Automotive Group Holdings will be building nearly half a million vehicles every year for the company by next year.
The move was provoked by the recent 40% tariff that China slapped on the vehicles, which in turn was in response to Donald Trump’s imposition of $34 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods, provoking the “largest trade war in history.”
The BMW move is likely to hit Trump voters the hardest, as their plant in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, employs over 10,000 people. BMW was once the largest auto exporter in the United States – but no more.
BMW’s announcement comes quick on the heels of Harley-Davidson Motorcycles’ announcement that they too would be moving production out of the U.S.A over Trump’s trade wars, costing yet more American jobs.
One watches and waits with a macabre curiosity to see what will happen when the would-be tyrant learns that you cannot simply dictate the terms you want and then throw lawyers and tweets at them until the other party concedes – and whether or not this will be a breaking point for his supporters, who cling to the strong economic numbers and job growth as evidence that they’ve made the right choice and deluding them into thinking that this sociopathic billionaire actually cares about them and their families.
