Politics
On Minnesota’s Iron Range, Trump’s Tariffs Could Be Boom or Bust
Once a week, most weeks, the ground in Chisholm, Minn., shudders underfoot.
“When they blast over here, we can feel it in town over there,” Jed Holewa, a City Council member, explained as he looked out over the pit of the Hibbing Taconite mine, a machine-made canyon of flint-colored earth extending to the hills just southwest of town.
The low rumble of controlled explosions is reassuring in an area where few livelihoods are more than a couple of degrees removed from the mines. But this month the ground beneath the Iron Range has begun to shift in a very different way.
The sedimentary rock known as taconite, found in abundance in northern Minnesota, yields most of the United States’ iron ore, which in turn is made into steel used by the American auto industry. Thus the seismic effects of President Trump’s March 26 announcement of a 25 percent tariff on all cars and auto parts imported into the United States. The measure is meant to benefit the domestic auto industry, and has earned praise from labor leaders. But analysts predict it will most likely throw that industry into near-term turmoil, and several domestic automakers saw their stock fall last week after Mr. Trump’s announcement.
The tariff announcement comes amid a brewing trade war between the United States and Canada prompted by Mr. Trump’s earlier threats to impose broad tariffs on America’s northern neighbor and its longstanding ally and trading partner. Canada has responded with its own tariffs.
At the same time, Cleveland-Cliffs, the steel conglomerate that controls Hibbing Taconite and other nearby mines, has announced plans to idle production lines and lay off more than 600 mine workers in the region, citing a softening of demand for cars. Mr. Holewa, a diesel mechanic at Hibbing Taconite, was among those waiting to hear his fate.
The son and grandson of miners, Mr. Holewa is well acquainted with both the fortunes and misfortunes of the industry, in which substantial union salaries go hand in hand with risk and uncertainty. His maternal grandfather was killed on the job, crushed by a haul truck. His father was laid off from a mine in Eveleth, Minn., in the 1980s, during the industry’s darkest period. The high points of its uneven recovery were memorialized in the model years of the Fords his family bought when he was growing up: a 1988 Tempo, a 1994 F-150.
Mr. Holewa, a Republican, is also indicative of the shifting politics of the Iron Range, where Mr. Trump made dramatic gains over previous Republican candidates in 2016 — the beginning of a collapse of a onetime rural Democratic stronghold where Republicans have since claimed most of the region’s seats in the State Legislature.
Mr. Holewa, who knocked on doors for Mr. Trump, was quick to note that the conditions that caused the layoffs preceded Mr. Trump’s tariff announcements.
“This has nothing to do with the tariffs,” he said. “Look at the price of vehicles right now. Sales are down. Lots are full.”
But a representative of Cleveland-Cliffs, whose chief executive has vocally supported Mr. Trump’s trade policy, has told local officials that the tariffs could potentially prolong the layoffs, according to Larry Cuffe Jr., the mayor of Virginia, Minn., another Iron Range town. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
And observers of Minnesota industry say the layoffs — the most serious non-Covid-related job cuts the Iron Range’s mines have experienced in a decade — are a reminder of how uniquely exposed the region is to Mr. Trump’s radical trade experiments: how much it stands to gain or lose — or both — from the shocks the president hopes to deliver to the system.
“It’s throwing a big uncertainty into the supply chain,” said Bob Kill, the chief executive of Enterprise Minnesota, an organization that assists manufacturers in the state. “You see it at the Iron Range happening with raw material.”
The range should in theory benefit from the expanded tariffs on imported steel that Mr. Trump announced in February. But it is also sensitive to shifts and uncertainty in the auto market, as this month’s layoffs have shown. And a trade war with Canada could upend many businesses in the region, which is closer to the Canadian border than to Minneapolis, and raise the price of an array of goods and services, including electricity and dairy products.
“We’re going to ride it out and see,” said Mike Jugovich, a county commissioner and a retired Hibbing Taconite miner in St. Louis County, which encompasses most of the Iron Range. “We don’t have a real choice in the matter. We’re joined at the hip to the tariffs.”
Boomtowns both wild and worldly
Most of America’s domestically produced iron has come from northern Minnesota since the turn of the 20th century, when steam shovels backed by Rockefeller and Carnegie money transformed miles of boreal forest into a muddy, sooty sprawl of hard-living frontier camps.
In those years, the mines drew thousands of immigrants from Finland and Croatia and everywhere in between, producing a boomtown culture both wild and cosmopolitan — a place where “the Babel of more than 30 different alien tongues mingles with the crash and clank of machinery,” as a federal immigration agent wrote in a 1912 report.
More than a century later, the Iron Range remains culturally distinct from the rest of the state. In towns like Chisholm, onion-domed churches punctuate residential neighborhoods, red-sauce Italian restaurants line the main drags and bars keep dusty bottles of pelinkovac, a Balkan wormwood liqueur, on the top shelf for the old-timers.
Many go back generations in the mines, their family trees intertwined with histories of corporate consolidations and labor strikes, of booms and, more often, busts.
“Anybody who’s lived on the range understands that these are the cycles that occur,” said Pete Hyduke, the mayor of Hibbing, just south of Chisholm, who went into government after he was laid off from his mining job in the 1980s.
Fewer than half as many miners are now employed on the Iron Range as were at the beginning of the ’80s, when jobs fell victim to technological improvements and to the decline of the domestic steel industry, undercut by cheaper imports and the migration of manufacturing away from the United States.
Today, the range’s fortunes turn largely on trade policy, the push and pull of free-trade agreements and tariffs. This became starkly evident in the 2010s, when China, whose steel production had grown to eclipse every other country’s, began flooding the international market, cutting global prices in half by 2015 and prompting thousands of layoffs at Minnesota’s mines. Since then, “the Iron Range has known that tariffs are important for our domestic production and survival,” said Cal Warwas, a Republican state representative and a steelworker from Clinton Township.
The Obama administration eventually imposed stiff anti-dumping tariffs on China, but the episode exacerbated local discontent with the Democratic Party. Iron Rangers’ fiercely pro-union politics had for decades made the region the great rural redoubt of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Minnesota’s variant on the Democratic Party. But in a socially conservative area whose fortunes rest on resource extraction, many found themselves dissenting from the D.F.L. on environmental protection and social issues, and convinced that an increasingly urban and suburban party was insufficiently attentive to the range’s economic concerns.
“They’ve become way too woke for me,” said Mr. Cuffe, the Virginia mayor, who left the D.F.L. and endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016.
Mr. Trump outperformed previous Republican candidates in the region in 2016, and endeared himself further by imposing 25 percent tariffs on Chinese steel during his first term. Today, the region’s delegation to the State Legislature is entirely Republican save for one state senator.
Hope and anxiety over tariffs
Tariffs on China are broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike on the Iron Range. But Mr. Trump’s promises to levy 25 percent tariffs on Canada and similar penalties on cars and car parts imported to the United States have raised alarm.
“I’m very supportive of protectionist policies on industries that matter to our national defense,” said Grant Hauschild, a state senator from Minnesota’s Canada-bordering Third District, and the one remaining Democrat in the Iron Range’s legislative delegation. “However, haphazard, across-the-board tariffs on everything, everywhere, all at once, on allies as well as adversaries, is not the best policy.”
A core issue, manufacturing experts say, is that even the domestic industries Mr. Trump wants to bolster now rely on complex supply chains that run back and forth across borders with regional trading partners, which are difficult to untangle in places like the Great Lakes region.
This is particularly true of the American auto industry, which “is highly dependent on a robust North American supply chain that often involves cross-border trade,” said Matteo Fini, an analyst at S&P Global. American-made catalytic converters are shipped to Canada for installation in exhaust systems that are then shipped back to the United States. American lithium is made into cathodes in Canada, which are assembled into battery packs in the United States and then sent north again for vehicle production.
Jolts to this system may well be felt on the Iron Range, and broader tariffs on Canada, as well as any reciprocal tariffs Canada imposes, will affect the region in other ways. Minnesota utilities buy Canadian hydropower. Paper mills run on Canadian wood pulp. Tourism and Great Lakes shipping, other mainstays of the regional economy, rely on easy border transit.
The local implications of a trade war are severe enough that some of Mr. Trump’s supporters on the range have concluded that despite his years of tariff evangelism, the president’s recent threats must be a bluff.
“I think it’s just a negotiating tactic to try to get some compromise,” said Mr. Cuffe. He paused. “I’m hoping that’s the case.”
For local Democrats, however, Mr. Trump’s antagonism of their northern neighbors has added confusion to their discontent with the president.
“All this stuff about Canada — I mean, where did it come from?” said Mary Beth Perreira, a retired public health nurse in Hibbing. “If you have a brain, you know that we’re going to pay for it all.”
But others have begun to come around to Mr. Trump’s vision.
“I don’t mind them hitting Canada,” said Tim Simpson, a retired truck driver from Hibbing.
Mr. Simpson moved away from the region for a time in the 1980s, after losing his job at a local taconite mine. A political independent, he voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but not in 2024.
Still, he said the president’s trade-war bluster might be good for the Iron Range.
“I hope it straightens a lot of stuff out, and we do get a lot of them jobs back,” he said. “We’ve been losing them since the ’60s, since I was a kid.”
By John Ismay, Gilad Thaler, Nikolay Nikolov, Rafaela Balster, Stephanie Swart and Whitney Shefte
June 19, 2026
Politics
Reporter’s Notebook: How Trump’s surprise move on DNI confirmation upended key Senate deal on FISA
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They didn’t know what to do.
Just before 4 a.m. ET on Wednesday, President Trump blindsided everyone in the U.S. Senate. In a post on Truth Social, the president declared he was “cancelling the Senate hearing” for his Director of National Intelligence nominee Jay Clayton. Moreover, the President said he would withhold Clayton’s nomination from “going forward until Jamie McDonald is approved to be U.S. Attorney.”
If confirmed, Clayton would vacate his post as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. That’s the slot for which the President is nominating McDonald.
TRUMP SAYS SENATE HEARING ON DNI NOMINEE IS CANCELED UNTIL US ATTORNEY REPLACEMENT CONFIRMED
Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks next to Jessica S. Tisch, New York Police Department commissioner, during a press conference at NYPD headquarters following the arrest of suspects charged with igniting IEDs near Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in New York City on March 9, 2026. (REUTERS/Brendan McDermid)
So what would happen with the hearing?
Lawmakers and aides scrambled as they woke to the news Wednesday morning. After all, Trump is the president. He doesn’t have the authority to cancel a Senate hearing.
“Yeah. I don’t think that’s his call,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., a member of the Intelligence Committee.
One senior source told Fox News they presumed that Clayton’s confirmation hearing would forge ahead. Another told Fox the fate of the hearing was “undetermined.”
On one hand, lawmakers and aides had to first digest what was happening. Was the President withdrawing Clayton’s nomination? Was he saying he just wasn’t allowing Clayton to testify? Did the head of the executive branch really believe he could bigfoot a congressional hearing? Or was this the president flexing his political muscle, testing Senate Republicans to see how compliant they might be with his intimation — and potentially cancel the hearing on their own?
So was Clayton’s hearing on or off?
“Are we going to have an Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing today?” yours truly asked panel Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., as he slid behind a backdoor to a hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
Silence from Cotton.
SCOOP: TOP GOP SEN. COTTON TO MEET WITH EMBATTLED TRUMP DEFENSE NOMINEE AS DOUBTS SWIRL
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., arrives for a vote in the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2025, stating the war with Iran will continue for weeks as the U.S. limits their offensive capabilities. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Do you know the answer?” I followed up.
“Do you think the President overstepped his bounds, saying he was canceling the hearing?” I continued.
By that point, Cotton was well behind the doorway and it closed.
“I have never seen anything quite like this,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of the longest-serving members on the Intelligence Committee in Senate history. “Everybody else is going to have to keep guessing for a while.”
It was Washington whiplash.
“Things change around here pretty quick, Chad,” quipped Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D.
But a bit later, Cotton finally weighed-in when he posted on X that the hearing would proceed. The Arkansas Republican then materialized again in the hallway, heading for an elevator bank.
“To be clear, you will proceed with the hearing and you expect Jay Clayton to be there despite what the President said?” I asked.
A steel-faced Cotton stared straight ahead at the green elevator door.
“Chad, you have our statement,” said a terse Cotton.
But an hour later, Cotton ditched the hearing after the President blocked Clayton from testifying.
“It’s regrettable that the President has directed Jay Clayton not to appear at his confirmation hearing today,” said Cotton in a new statement on X. “While today’s hearing is now unfortunately postponed, I look forward to proceeding with his confirmation in the near future.”
The stunning reversal left everyone trying to grasp what happened. And what might be next.
SPRINT TO CONFIRM TRUMP NOMINEES KICKS OFF IN JANUARY
U.S. President Donald Trump attends a morning work meeting to “revive balanced, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth for the benefit of all” in the presence of the G7 countries, partner countries, the International Monetary Fund, and the OECD, as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, eastern France, on June 17, 2026. (Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images)
“I am not sure whether Jay Clayton has simply been postponed or withdrawn,” mused Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “I wonder whether Jay Clayton knows whether he has been postponed or withdrawn.”
Democrats and Republicans brokered a fragile agreement weeks ago to renew FISA Section 702. The intelligence community argues that program is the powerful tool in the American arsenal to track and combat potential terrorism. Congress repeatedly punted a full renewal for months.
But with both bodies on the precipice of reauthorizing the program, President Trump announced he would install housing czar Bill Pulte as interim DNI. Democrats balked at Pulte, noting he had no intelligence experience. Plus, they viewed him as a political hack who would run roughshod over America’s intelligence apparatus.
So Democrats pulled their support from the FISA compromise.
Most Republicans weren’t exactly enamored with Pulte, either. And those worried about the nation’s security pushed to block Pulte from entering the DNI’s office. That’s why Cotton scheduled Clayton’s confirmation hearing so quickly. It was thought that the Senate might be able to pivot after the hearing and confirm Clayton on the floor late this week or early next.
Rapid confirmation of Clayton was essential. Such a scenario would unlock Democrats’ votes to reauthorize FISA Section 702 after the program’s congressional blessing expired a week ago.
That was the plan. At least until the president initiated the firestorm over Clayton’s confirmation hearing this week.
“Another Trump victory gets upended by an impulse,” vented Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. “It’s frustrating.”
WHY TRUMP PICKED BILL PULTE TO LEAD US INTELLIGENCE AS CRITICS QUESTION HIS QUALIFICATIONS
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., spoke to reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on April 1, 2025, before the weekly Republican Senate policy luncheon. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
But wait. There’s more.
President Trump inserted another chestnut — or hot potato — into his pre-dawn Truth Social screed. Especially if you thought the president was going to make it easy for Congress to hastily re-up FISA as soon as the Senate confirmed Clayton.
“To add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it,” Trump said.
He added that his plan was for Pulte to “remain as the Acting Director of National Intelligence” and declared that “Republicans fell into a trap.”
The SAVE America Act is the touchstone of President Trump’s 2026 legislative agenda. It requires proof of citizenship to vote. However, the bill has never garnered even 50 yeas in the Senate on two previous test votes.
“We’ve got to pass the SAVE America Act and conditioning passage of FISA on the prior passage of SAVE America would be a great thing,” said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
Other Senate Republicans were more realistic, based on the legislative history of the SAVE America Act.
“You can’t always get what you want,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “I mean, I want a Porsche for my birthday. I’m not going to get it.”
TRUMP, THUNE CLASH ON VOTER ID ULTIMATUM AS GOP REMAINS DIVIDED ON PATH FORWARD
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said a classified briefing reinforced his view that Iran’s leaders would use a nuclear weapon if they obtained one during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C. (Elizabeth Frantz / Reuters)
Democrats seethed about national security as Republicans squirmed.
“We had a path forward as of yesterday (on FISA) and today we don’t,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz. “This has become a complete debacle and now it’s up to the White House to figure out a path forward here.”
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No one knows what’s next for Clayton. Or McDonald. Or FISA. And there’s high skepticism anything happens on the SAVE America Act. So it’s all in a cryogenic Congressional freeze.
Regardless, Clayton’s confirmation hearing never happened. Such hearings are the responsibility of the legislative branch. But by the end of the day, there was no question who canceled it.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled for gun rights and against drug laws on Thursday, striking down part of a federal law that made it a crime for an “unlawful user” of an illegal drug like marijuana to own firearms.
All nine justices agreed the law was too broad and overly harsh.
They left open the possibility that “addicts” and “unusually dangerous” people who were impaired by drugs could be denied guns.
The Trump administration had urged the court to uphold the prosecution of Ali Hemani, a Texas man who was investigated for alleged terrorist ties and admitted to being a regular user of marijuana.
Since 1968, federal law has prohibited gun possession by felons, fugitives and any other person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”
In defense of the law, Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer argued that “habitual” drug users were akin to “habitual drunkards” in early American history, and could therefore be denied the gun rights protected by the 2nd Amendment.
But that historical argument fell flat, including with the court’s conservatives.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is a skeptic of laws that give prosecutors broad and unchecked power.
“The law automatically bans an individual from possessing a gun from the moment he becomes an unlawful user of any controlled substance until he ceases being one,” he wrote in U.S. vs. Hemani. “It doesn’t matter what controlled substance an individual uses, in what amounts he does so, or whether his drug use has ever made him a danger to himself or others.”
The government’s view “suggests that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous.”
And a conviction can lead to a 15-year prison term, he added.
The American Civil Liberties Union welcomed the ruling.
“The court has sent a strong message that the government cannot criminalize the conduct of large numbers of people by making categorical and unfounded assumptions about whether they are dangerous,” said Cecillia Wang, legal director at the ACLU. “With nearly half of Americans reporting marijuana use at some point in their lives, this ruling protects the rights of millions and curbs the government’s ability to impose arbitrary and discriminatory penalties.”
Some defenders of gun regulation opposed the ruling.
“We disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hemani,” said Janet Carter, managing director of 2nd Amendment litigation at Everytown Law. “That said, the court has stressed that its decision is limited — rightly recognizing that drugs and guns can make for a dangerous mix, and leaving open the possibility of prosecuting someone with proof that their drug use renders their gun possession dangerous to themselves or others.”
Two years ago, Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was charged and convicted under the gun law for making a false statement when he applied for a gun permit. He denied being a drug user at a time when prosecutors said he was addicted to crack cocaine.
Then-President Biden gave him a full pardon in December 2024.
Hemani was investigated by the FBI for suspected ties to terrorists but was not charged with such a crime.
In 2020, he and his parents “traveled to Iran to participate in a celebration of the life of Qasem [Suleimani], an Iranian general and terrorist who had been killed by an American drone strike the month before,” the administration told the court last year.
The FBI obtained a warrant to search Hemani’s family home. Agents found a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, 60 grams of marijuana and 4.7 grams of cocaine.
When questioned, Hemani said he used marijuana about every other day.
A federal grand jury in Texas charged him with possessing a firearm as an unlawful habitual user of marijuana.
But the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this restriction on guns violated the 2nd Amendment. It said that “there is no historical justification for disarming a sober citizen not presently under an impairing influence.”
Appealing to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration urged the justices to uphold the law.
“Habitual illegal drug users with firearms present unique dangers to society — especially because they pose a grave risk of armed, hostile encounters with police officers while impaired,” the solicitor general said.
But the justices affirmed the 5th Circuit’s decision.
Still pending before the court is a 2nd Amendment challenge to new laws in Hawaii and California that would prohibit carrying guns into private businesses unless the owner or manager had given their express approval.
Gun rights advocates said such laws, if enforced, are intended to deny their rights to carry concealed weapons when they leave home. The case is Wolford vs. Lopez.
The justices will issue decisions next week on Tuesday and Thursday.
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