(ZeroHedge)—President Trump announced late on Friday that his administration will double tariffs on steel imports from 25% to 50%, saying the move would help protect American steelworkers during a visit to a United States Steel Corp. plant in Pittsburgh on Friday focused on boosting the US steel industry.
Trump was visiting the plant to champion an expected deal between United States Steel Corp. and Japan’s Nippon Steel Corp. as one that would ensure the iconic American firm remains US-owned and operated, even as details on the agreement remain vague. He said the new tariffs would benefit the new venture’s US operations.
“We’re going to bring it from 25 to 50 percent on steel into the United States of America, which will even further secure the steel industry in the United States,” Trump said during remarks at a steel factory in Pittsburgh, flanked by banners that read “The Golden Age,” “American Jobs” and “American Steel.”
Trump previously imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports, arguing it would boost the US steel industry. Those were in addition to tariffs on automobile tariffs, and a baseline 10% tariff on all imports.
Those tariffs have faced legal scrutiny and skepticism from Wall Street and critics on both sides of the aisle, who have warned that the tariffs will ultimately lead to price increases for consumers. Trump and his allies have insisted the tariff threats, which have often been delayed or revised, have been effective at bringing other countries to the negotiating table.
The five largest sources of imported steel into the US are Canada, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Vietnam.
The president’s announcement came as part of an event to tout what Trump called a “blockbuster” agreement between U.S. Steel and Japanese-owned Nippon Steel.
“I believe that this group of people that just made this investments right now are very happy, because that means that nobody’s going to be able to steal your industry,” Trump said. “It’s at 25%, they can sort of get over that fence, at 50% they can no longer get over the fence.”
The new 50% level also offers a backstop for Trump’s promise that the US Steel-Nippon deal, which he opposed on the campaign trail, would benefit steelworkers in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania. The deal was opposed by the United Steelworkers, who worried Japanese ownership could see capacity reduced and jobs shifted to other plants.
“We’re here today to celebrate a blockbuster agreement that will ensure this storied American company stays an American company,” Trump said in remarks from a factory in Allegheny County. “We’re going to have a great partner. And I have to tell you, Japan has been a tremendous friend of mine during my years as president.”
Trump’s decision marked a stunning reversal on a transaction that he had fiercely opposed on the campaign trail, but the president cast the shift as coming with concessions from Nippon Steel that benefitted steelworkers.
“Everytime they came in, the deal got better and better and better for the workers,” Trump said, stressing that US Steel would remain headquartered in Pittsburgh.
The president last week cast it as a “planned partnership” bringing investments to the US — not as an outright sale of an American company. Even after Trump’s announcement last week, work continued on the terms, including what veto powers the US government will retain over the board of the US Steel subsidiary.
“In Washington, I’m going to be watching over it, and it’s going to be great,” Trump said.
The Friday event caps what has been a politically contentious and tumultuous path for Nippon Steel’s bid to purchase an iconic American firm, a lengthy saga that left both companies in limbo. Nippon Steel initially proposed a $14.1 billion transaction for US Steel.
The event also had the tone of a victory lap, with Trump receiving a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey and a golden hard hat during his visit, but despite the celebratory tone, critical details on the deal were unclear ahead of Friday’s event. Investors are eager for any insight into the agreement a week after he first announced that he would approve the deal.
Last week Trump announced a new partnership between U.S. Steel and Nippon on social media, saying it “will create at least 70,000 jobs, and add $14 Billion Dollars to the U.S. Economy.”
U.S. Steel’s fate had been uncertain dating back to December 2023, when Japan-based Nippon steel said it planned to acquire the Pittsburgh-based company. The fate of U.S. Steel became a hot button issue during the 2024 campaign, particularly given its headquarters was in a key battleground.
Both Trump and former President Biden had opposed the sale of U.S. Steel. Biden blocked the sale shortly before leaving office, citing national security reasons.
Advocates for a deal between Nippon Steel and US Steel have long argued that the Japanese company would help revitalize the American firm with investments. But the deal also faced resistance from the powerful United Steelworkers union that operates US Steel mills across the country.
The next steps to consummate the deal are not entirely clear. Both sides need to finalize their agreement through the Cfius review process. It’s not clear whether the text of any mitigation agreement — which is likely to spell out what powers the US government retains — is finalized.
Trump invited on stage former Pittsburgh Steelers player Rocky Bleier and current Steelers players Mason Rudolph and Miles Killebrew, who presented the president with a football jersey to express their appreciation. But as the Hill notes, the intended focus was on Trump’s attempts to revive the steel industry. The president argued other presidents had ignored the steel industry at the expense of places like Pittsburgh.
The US was the world’s fourth-largest steel producing nation as of 2023, according to the World Steel Association. It is also the world’s largest steel importer, excluding the European Union, according to the International Trade Association.
“Decades of Washington betrayal and incompetence and stupidity and corruption cost this region over 100,000 steel jobs, and they melted away just like butter melts away,” Trump said.
Shares of other US steel companies including Nucor Corp., Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. and Steel Dynamics Inc. rallied in after-hours trading.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
