If President Donald Trump's tariffs were boosting the prospects of American-based manufacturing, then Ford Motor Co. ought to be one of the biggest winners.
After all, Ford builds more vehicles in the United States than any other automaker—it churned out 1.8 million of them last year—while employing around 57,000 manufacturing workers at plants across the upper Midwest. It's a legacy American brand, doing the sort of blue-collar work in the Rust Belt that the Trump administration believes its trade policies will directly benefit.
In reality, the tariffs are crushing Ford. The automaker announced this week that it paid $800 million in tariff-related expenses during the second quarter of 2025 (during which it posted its first quarterly loss since 2023), and that it expects the tariffs to reduce annual profits by about $3 billion. Even for a company that earned an operating profit of $10.2 billion last year, that's a tremendous blow.
