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.”
Politics
Commentary: For all the chatter by mayoral candidates, can anyone fix L.A.’s enduring problems?
I’m going to start this story on a quiet tree-lined street in Mar Vista, where a couple I met with on Thursday — the day after the L.A. mayoral debate — have a problem.
It’s not an unusual matter, as things go in Los Angeles. On both sides of the street, the sidewalk rises and falls, uprooted and cracked by shallow roots because over many decades, the trees were not properly maintained.
John Coanda, 61, who grew up in Los Angeles, was never bothered by torn-up sidewalks as a kid.
“In fact,” he said when he first emailed me about his predicament, “my friends and I sometimes used the ramping pavement as jumps for our bicycles.”
But his wife, Barbara, was diagnosed in 2024 with ALS, and she uses a wheelchair. When John pushes her, they can’t use the sidewalk if they want to go to the store or meet with friends, or just enjoy a nice pass through the neighborhood without getting into a vehicle.
So John pushes Barbara’s wheelchair in the street, which creates an obvious safety problem. And despite John’s best efforts to get City Hall to fix the sidewalks, he’s not expecting help anytime soon.
I’ll circle back to this story, but first, about that debate.
I recruited a half-dozen L.A. residents to watch and send me their thoughts about how the candidates tackled the important issues. And then I felt guilty for having done so, because the candidates didn’t do much tackling at all.
Candidate Spencer Pratt is shown on a television while journalists work during the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral debate at Skirball Cultural Center.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
They hit their talking points, for sure, and Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya Raman and TV personality Spencer Pratt each had their moments. But by the end of the debate, and two straight nights of gubernatorial debates as well, I came away thinking there were no clear winners, but there was a definite loser.
Voters.
This is the fault of the format more than of the candidates themselves. The deck is stacked against meaningful, substantive discussions, especially when moderators ask — as they did several times — for one-word answers.
“Moderator questions are so meaningless … and they make it easy for candidates to take potshots at each other,” said longtime political sage Darry Sragow. “The format is guaranteed to elicit nothing that matters.”
It’d be better to have single-issue debates, and to have candidates pressed for details by journalists who cover those issues and can push back against unrealistic promises and expose a lack of depth.
My debate watchers did some of that themselves. CSUN librarian Yi Ding had praise and criticism for each candidate, but was looking for concrete plans and didn’t get many.
Ding was also disappointed that two other mayoral candidates — Ray Huang and Adam Miller — were not invited to the debate, and I agree with her. Both have been polling low, but with so many undecided voters, and such high unfavorability ratings for Bass, they should have been in the mix.
Mike Washington, a retired pharmacist and West Adams resident, said Bass has done better than previous mayors on homelessness and he didn’t think Raman or Pratt came off as worthy of bumping her out of City Hall.
“The public would have benefited from more questions related to the challenges young people are facing,” said Juan Solorio Jr., president of the San Fernando Valley Young Democrats club. His colleague David Ramirez agreed, saying he was hoping for “more discussion about the cost of living for young adults,” but he and Solorio are both backing Bass.
West L.A. software developer Mike Eveloff asked the million-dollar question in one of his many observations during the debate:
“Why is LA spending record amounts on homelessness, fire, police, and infrastructure while results deteriorate? Streets and sidewalks crumble. Even the city emblem right in front of City Hall is deteriorated. With the World Cup and Olympics approaching, voters need to know: Do these leaders have the financial discipline and operational competence to manage a fourteen billion dollar city?”
Venice resident Dennis Hathaway, author of “An Octogenarian’s Journal,” said he thinks “these kinds of debates are pretty non-edifying.” And, as someone I wrote about two years ago regarding busted sidewalks in his neighborhood, he shared this lament about Thursday’s debate:
“No mention of broken sidewalks, potholed streets, other deteriorated infrastructure. To me, that’s a much more important subject than non-citizens voting in city elections.”
(Bass did say during the debate that there was a new infrastucture plan in place, and that’s a step in the right direction. But there was no discussion, and when you read the details, 2028 Olympics projects will be prioritized, and it’ll take years to figure out how to fund thousands of additional much-needed fixes.)
The Coandas live not far from Hathaway, and their lives have been upended first by Barbara’s diagnosis and then by John getting laid off in February from his job as a data analyst. Barbara still teaches French via Zoom, and John is tending to her needs. They started a Gofundme campaign to help pay their bills.
With Barbara in a wheelchair, John contacted the city’s Safe Sidewalks L.A. program last fall, and I think it’s fair to say that name is somewhere between a misnomer and a bad joke.
The “program” responded by email on Halloween, appropriately enough, informing him that under the City Council-approved “Sidewalk Repair Program Prioritization and Scoring System,” his request for help merits only 15 points out of a possible 45.
“Currently,” he was informed, “the estimated wait time for completion of an Access Request with a score of 15 is in excess of 10 years.”
Happy Halloween.
Over the years, responsibility for sidewalk repairs has shifted between the city and homeowners. There’s a rebate program available to people who repair their own sidewalks, but it’s capped at an amount that doesn’t always cover the costs. And ruptured pavement is keeping lots of lawyers busy with trip-and-fall lawsuits that cost the city millions each year.
Barbara Durieux Coanda, who has ALS, and her husband, John Coanda, make their way down the ramp in front of their home in Mar Vista.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Coanda told me he doesn’t have the funds at the moment to pay for repairs, and even if he did, there are several more sidewalk disaster zones on both sides of his street, so he’d still have to push his wife’s wheelchair in the street even if he fixed the cracks in front of his own house.
Barbara graciously said she thinks the city has other, higher priorities, but in November her husband contacted the office of Councilmember Traci Park, saying he was told that he would have to wait 10 years for repairs.
“Sadly,” he wrote, “I don’t think my wife will live that long.”
A Park staffer wrote back, saying, “The turnaround time does sound realistic given the budgetary crisis the city finds itself in.” But, the staffer added, maybe the council member’s office could “help move the needle on this request.”
Coanda said he’s been too busy with his wife’s issues to follow up. But Pete Brown, Park’s communications director, told me Friday afternoon that the office is exploring ways to pay for fixes that don’t take 10 years, including the use of discretionary funds.
I don’t know how that might play out, but I do know that L.A. doesn’t need another debate like the last one.
We need a mayor and council members who refuse to accept that it takes 10 years to create safe passage for a wheelchair.
In the national capital of broken sidewalks, we need concrete plans.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
Government drones, errant weather balloons, experimental spy planes, rocket launches and exhaust plumes are just some of the aerial phenomena that have generated U.F.O. sightings.
Whatever the source, there is no end to the public’s fascination with mysterious objects darting across the sky.
In recent years, the government has sought to disclose more of the information — including videos, historical documents and grainy images — that it has collected on what it calls unidentified anomalous phenomena. Congress has held hearings in its own search for answers.
On Friday, the Pentagon released what it called “new, never-before-seen” files related to unidentified flying objects on a webpage with fonts and graphics reminiscent of a 1990s sci-fi thriller.
President Trump described it as a promise fulfilled.
“Whereas previous Administrations have failed to be transparent on this subject, with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’” he wrote on Truth Social.
The Pentagon said more records would be released on a rolling basis.
Some of the initial files include documents from the 1960s space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, when both countries were pushing beyond Earth’s limits.
One of the documents — which has been previously cited in books — was a 1969 technical debriefing of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the three American astronauts on the Apollo 11 moon mission.
In it, Mr. Aldrin recalls that when he was trying to sleep during the mission, “I observed what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart.”
Mr. Aldrin also recounts seeing “what appeared to be a fairly bright light source, which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser.”
A 1963 government memorandum reflects concerns within the Kennedy administration that the United States was not preparing for the possibility, however remote, of humans encountering aliens.
In it, Maxwell W. Hunter II, a prominent aerospace engineer, warned that, without some planning, “our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.”
Here’s a look at some key events in the recent push for information about U.F.O.s.
May 2019
A New York Times report detailed strange aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots, including flying objects that they said had no visible engines or infrared exhaust plumes, but could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
June 2021
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report cataloging 143 unexplained aerial phenomena dating to 2004. The report did not draw conclusions or offer explanations for most of the events.
November 2021
The Pentagon announced a new group to investigate reports of unidentified aerial phenomena in sensitive areas, work that would be overseen by both military and intelligence agencies.
May 2022
Pentagon officials, testifying at the first congressional hearing on military reports of U.F.O.s in more than a half-century, showed a previously classified video of a reflective spherical object speeding past a military jet. It remains unexplained. Officials testified that the government had not collected material from any aliens.
June 2022
NASA announced a new study of unidentified aerial phenomena. An agency official described it as “high-risk, high-impact kind of research” that could uncover some new scientific phenomenon — or nothing at all.
December 2022
President Biden signed an $858 billion military spending bill that included a requirement for the Pentagon to review historical documents related to U.F.O.s dating to 1945. That was the year that, according to one account, a large, avocado-shaped object struck a communication tower in a patch of New Mexico desert now known as the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated.
September 2023
NASA appointed its first director of research on unidentified anomalous phenomena. The position was recommended by an independent study team that called for the agency to play a bigger role in examining U.F.O.s.
March 2024
A Pentagon report found no evidence that the government covered up knowledge of extraterrestrials and no evidence that any U.F.O. sightings actually were aliens visiting Earth. The 63-page report was a sweeping rebuttal to claims that the government had secretly harbored alien spacecraft or alien technology.
February 2026
Former President Barack Obama tells a YouTuber that aliens are “real, but I haven’t seen them and they’re not being kept in Area 51.” The clip ricocheted across the internet, stirring wild speculation. Mr. Obama later clarified that he believed extraterrestrials likely exist in the universe, but “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
February 2026
Mr. Trump directed his administration to begin releasing files related to aliens, extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects. He also attacked Mr. Obama for his comments about aliens in the YouTube interview, insisting he “gave classified information; he’s not supposed to be doing that.”
May 2026
Days before the Trump administration released the latest files, Mr. Obama said in an interview with Stephen Colbert that the government was not hiding aliens. “For those of you who still think we’ve got little green men underground somewhere: One of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets,” Mr. Obama said.
Politics
Newsom’s ‘Golden State Start’ promises 400 free diapers per baby as California grapples with budget woes
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Gov. Gavin Newsom is rolling out a taxpayer-backed freebie for new parents, promising hundreds of diapers for every baby born in California under a new statewide program.
The Democrat announced Friday that the state will partner with nonprofit Baby2Baby to hand out 400 free diapers to families leaving participating hospitals, starting this summer. The initiative, dubbed “Golden State Start,” is being billed as a first-in-the-nation effort to ease the high cost of raising a child.
“Every baby born in California deserves a healthy start in life,” Newsom said in a statement, touting the plan as part of his broader push to tackle affordability.
CALIFORNIA IS BROKE, BUT IT’S NOT TOO LATE FOR THE REST OF US
Calif. Governor Gavin Newsom announced on May 8 that the state is partnering with Baby2Baby, a leading national nonprofit organization headquartered in California, to launch a first-in-the-nation program to provide free diapers to all new babies born in California. (Governor Gavin Newsom)
Under the program, hospitals will distribute the diapers directly to parents upon discharge. Officials said early rollout will prioritize facilities serving low-income patients on Medi-Cal, with plans to expand statewide.
During the program’s first year, it will be offered at about 65 to 75 hospitals that handle about a quarter of births in the state and largely serve low-income patients, Newsom’s office said, according to the Associated Press.
The move is the latest in a string of family-focused spending initiatives from the Newsom administration, which already includes free school meals and universal preschool for 4-year-olds.
Critics are likely to challenge the program’s price tag, particularly as California navigates a tightening fiscal environment. Fox News Digital has reached out to the governor’s office regarding the costs of the program.
According to the Associated Press, the state has allocated $7.4 million in last year’s budget to launch the free diaper initiative, and Governor Newsom’s latest proposal seeks an additional $12.5 million for implementation through the fiscal year ending in June 2027.
However, these spending goals collide with a sobering economic reality.
In its January budget overview, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) noted that while the administration officially projected a $2.9 billion deficit for 2026-27, the long-term outlook is far more dire. The LAO warned that the state faces structural deficits ranging from $20 billion to $35 billion annually over the coming years
The state has partnered with nonprofit Baby2Baby to manufacture the diapers under the label “Golden State Start.” (Governor Gavin Newsom)
State officials said that they are also looking at ways to take on major diaper brands and drive down prices.
Baby2Baby, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that distributes supplies to children in need, will handle manufacturing and logistics for the program. The group says diaper need is widespread, with as many as one in two families struggling to afford them.
CALIFORNIA SCHOOL DISTRICT INFORMS PARENTS PERIOD PRODUCTS ARE IN BATHROOMS FOR ‘ANY STUDENT WHO MENSTRUATES’
Co-CEOs Norah Weinstein and Kelly Sawyer Patricof praised the partnership as “historic,” saying it will help families during one of their most financially vulnerable moments.
“We are incredibly grateful to Governor Newsom for his ongoing commitment to combating diaper needs in California and could not be prouder to partner on this historic initiative that will support moms and babies at their most vulnerable time,” Weinstein and Patricof said in a joint statement.
During the program’s first year, it will be offered at about 65 to 75 hospitals that handle about a quarter of births in the state and largely serve low-income patients, Newsom’s office said. (Governor Gavin Newsom)
The announcement comes two years after Tennessee and Delaware became the first U.S. states to offer free diapers to families enrolled in their Medicaid programs, which provide healthcare to low-income families.
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Tennessee families can go to pharmacies to pick up 100 diapers per month for children under two. The Delaware program, which began as a pilot before the state extended it in 2024, provides individuals with up to 80 diapers and up to one pack of baby wipes per week in the first 12 weeks.
Fox News Digital’s Michael Dorgan and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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