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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.
