When President Donald Trump announced a sweeping set of tariffs on nearly all imports, he promised that April 2—what the White House dubbed "Liberation Day"—would "forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn."
That's not the way Michele Derrigo-Barnes sees it. Trump's tariffs are "killing" small American manufacturers like hers, she tells Reason.
As CEO of Plattco Corporation, a small business that makes industrial valves, Derrigo-Barnes runs the sort of blue-collar industrial production shop that Trump and his allies say they want to help. Instead of being helped, she found herself dealing with fallout from the tariff announcement: canceled orders, higher prices, and enough uncertainty to put on hold a planned expansion of the company's Plattsburgh, New York, manufacturing center on the banks of Lake Champlain.
