From Baseball Bats to Caskets, Trump Tariffs Set to Hit Home

If and when President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum take effect at a minute past midnight in Washington on March 12, it will mark a repeat of first-term levies that he and his supporters argue helped rescue the United States’ metal makers.

One thing will be very different this time: The proposed tariffs are coming directly for more than $150 billion in imported consumer products as well as the raw steel and aluminum they hit last time.

That means new tariffs of at least 25% on everything from the aluminum baseball bats little-leaguers use to fishing reels and nets, roller skates and sewing needles. Even bidding farewell to a loved one is about to get more expensive, with burial caskets set to be hit by the new import taxes.

The economic fallout depends on Trump’s stop-start policy threats and what he chooses to carry through on. On March 11 stocks tumbled after Trump proposed doubling the metals tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50% in response to a threat by Ontario’s premier to levy a 25% surcharge on electricity sales. Stocks eventually pared their losses after both men backed down.

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via Associated Press 

The wider targeting fits with an evolving pattern to Trump’s trade policy strategy and points to why economists and financial markets are growing more concerned about a slowdown and the broader effects of protectionism on the U.S. economy.

In the seven weeks since Trump returned to the White House, the sheer volume of tariff announcements has caught economists and investors by surprise. But for many Americans, the breadth of the new duties is likely to mark the biggest difference from last time, magnifying just how reliant they are on imported products in their everyday lives.

The president and CEO of steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. said changing consumer behavior away from buying foreign-made goods is part of the strategy, even if it costs more.

“The American dream is not buying cheap stuff on Amazon,” Lourenco Goncalves said at a news conference March 7 announcing a corporate subsidy program rewarding employees with a $1,000 “bonus” for buying a car made with a substantial amount of the company’s steel.

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Calls for trade-offs in family budgets appear to run counter to Trump’s campaign promises to tackle the high inflation that fueled support for the Republican billionaire in November’s election.

“They have gone quickly from ‘all prices will go down’ to ‘cheap goods are not part of the American dream,’” said Edward Gresser, who led the economic research unit at the U.S. Trade Representative’s office during the first Trump administration and is now at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank.

That hit to consumers has already prompted a backlash, with polls showing Trump’s tariffs are unpopular largely because of the potential impact on prices. Almost 60% of U.S. adults expect Trump’s tariffs to lead to higher prices, a Harris Poll conducted for Bloomberg News found last month.

Studies have shown that consumers often end up bearing the cost of tariffs paid at the border by U.S. importers. Yet the impact on prices of individual goods from taxes like tariffs can surpass even the headline rate, said Nirupama Rao, an economist at the University of Michigan’s business school and fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

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Companies tend to use tariffs and other taxes as an excuse to not just defray higher costs but to raise prices further, said Rao, who has studied the relationship between taxes and alcohol prices in particular.

‘Golden Opportunity’

That is partly a function of how prices are set. If a new tax raises the notional price of a pair of roller skates to $21.12, for instance, the company selling them is likely to raise them to a more familiar price like $21.99, Rao said. The attention now paid to tariffs makes price increases even more likely, she said.

“This is a golden opportunity to raise prices and blame the tariffs,” Rao said.

Besides the steel and aluminum tariffs due to take effect March 12, the Trump administration has already imposed 20% blanket duties on imports from China. Those are raising the cost of consumer electronics products like televisions and smartphones that weren’t affected during his first-term assault on Chinese goods. They’ve also drawn warnings of a potential hit to sales from major retailers like Walmart Inc. and Best Buy Co.

Walmart ranks No. 1 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest private carriers in North America.

That willingness to hit consumer goods is part of what appears to be a deliberate change in strategy and the shifting goals of Trump’s new trade wars.

During his first term, Trump’s advisers made an effort to target China duties at components and other so-called intermediate goods that fed into the production of consumer products, said Anna Wong, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers in 2019 and 2020.

The priorities appear to have changed, said Wong, who is now Bloomberg Economics’ chief U.S. economist. Raising revenues from a broad swathe of new import taxes now competes with the objective of avoiding a hit on consumers. The administration also seems open to the possibility of tariffs and other policies leading to a slowdown and possibly even a recession.

The impact on consumption and growth from tariffs and efforts to cut the size of government “is negative so far in the short term,” Wong said. “It seems like Trump is on board now for short-term pain and long-term gain. This seems to be the motto.”

No Exemptions

During Trump’s first trade wars, his administration also set up elaborate exemption programs that allowed companies to avoid the so-called Section 232 tariffs on specific types of imported steel or aluminum if they could prove it wasn’t available domestically.

Steel producers, though, complained that those exclusions, paired with carve-outs negotiated by countries including Canada and Mexico, diluted the protectionist benefits of tariffs. This time around, they have invested heavily in making the case to Trump and his advisers not to allow exemptions but also to extend the tariffs to products made of steel and aluminum.

“We applaud this broad tariff coverage as well as the elimination of the steel Section 232 exclusion process that has been exploited as a loophole by foreign producers,” five steel industry groups wrote in a letter to Trump on March 10.

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Broadening the impact of the tariffs, though, also has meant extending them to many other products that aren’t necessarily associated with steel and aluminum.

According to economists at Global Trade Alert, the extension of the 25% aluminum and steel tariffs to so-called derivative products will hit 289 different product categories, imports of which were worth $151 billion in 2024, or 4.5% of U.S. imports last year. That’s significantly more than the value of all steel and aluminum imported in 2024, according to Census bureau data.

Household Items

Covered by the new tariffs are industrial inputs like automotive body parts and accessories — imports of which were worth $18 billion in 2024 — and parts for air conditioners and other appliances.

Also targeted are many household goods ranging from stainless steel cookware and metal furniture to sports equipment like indoor bikes and rowing machines and archery gear.

Also getting hit: aluminum baseball bats, imports of which were part of the $307 million in baseball equipment the U.S. imported last year, according to the Global Trade Alert analysis.

Among those are products from China that will now face both the new tariffs on Chinese imports and the additional duties on steel and aluminum products, a hit of 45% in a matter of weeks, said Simon Evenett, a professor at Switzerland’s IMD business school who is a co-founder of the Global Trade Alert.

“This really multiplies the impact of tariffs along a supply chain in ways we didn’t see in [the first Trump term],” Evenett said.