Once a week, most weeks, the ground in Chisholm, Minnesota, trembles under my feet.
“When they explode here, we can feel it in the town over there,” explained City Council member Jed Holwa, looking out over the holes in the Hibbin Taconite Mine, a flint-colored earth machine-made canyon that stretches to the hill just south of town.
The low rumble of controlled explosions is comforting in areas with few livelihoods above a few degrees removed from the mine. However, this month the ground below the iron range began to move in a very different way.
Sedimentary rocks known as taconites, found abundantly in northern Minnesota, produce most of the American iron ore, which becomes the steel used by the American automotive industry. Therefore, the earthquake effect of President Trump's announcement of a 25% tariff on all cars and auto parts imported into the US on March 26th. The measure aims to benefit the domestic automotive industry and has earned praise from Labour leaders. But analysts predict it is most likely to plunge the industry into short-term disruptions, with some domestic automakers dropping in stocks last week after Trump's announcement.
The tariff announcement comes amid the brewing trade war between the US and Canada, prompted by Trump's previous threat to impose widespread tariffs on US Northern neighbors and their longtime allies and trading partners. Canada responded with its own customs duties.
At the same time, Cleveland-Cliffs, a steel conglomerate that controls Hibbing Taconite and other nearby mines, has announced plans to idle production lines and fire more than 600 miners in the area, citing softening demand for cars. Holewa, a diesel mechanic at Hibbing Taconite, was among those waiting to hear his fate.
The miner's son and grandson, Holwa is well versed in both industry wealth and misfortune, with a substantial union salary working with risk and uncertainty. His maternal grandfather was killed at work and crushed by a haul truck. His father was fired from the mines in Everez, Minnesota in the 1980s, during the darkest times in the industry. That high point of uneven recovery was commemorated in the model age of Ford, which he purchased while growing up: the 1988 Tempo, the 1994 F-150.
Hallwa, a Republican, shows the changing politics of iron that Trump dramatically profited against his former Republican candidate in 2016.
Knocking on the door for Trump, Holwa quickly realized that the condition that caused the layoff was the announcement of Trump's tariffs.
“This has nothing to do with tariffs,” he said. “Look at the price of the vehicle now. Sales are declining. There are a lot of sales.”
But the representative of Cleveland Cliffs, whose CEO is vocally supporting Trump's trade policy, told local officials that tariffs could extend the layoffs, according to Virginia Mayor Larry Cuff Jr., another Iron Range town. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
And Minnesota industry observers are layoffs — reducing the iron range that has experienced the most serious non-covid-related work in a decade — is a reminder of how they are uniquely exposed to Trump's radical trade experiments.
“It casts a great deal of uncertainty in the supply chain,” said Bob Kill, CEO of Enterprise Minnesota, which supports state manufacturers. “You see it in the range of iron that's happening with the ingredients.”
This range, in theory, should benefit from Trump's expanded tariffs on imported steel, which he announced in February. However, as this month's layoffs showed, they are also sensitive to shifts and uncertainties in the automotive market. The trade war with Canada also overturned many businesses in areas closer to the Canadian border than Minneapolis, raising prices for an array of goods and services, including electricity and dairy products.
“We're going to get through that and see it,” said Mike Zugovich, a county commissioner and retired Hib Taconite Miner from St. Louis County, which includes most of the iron range. “We don't have a real option for this issue. We're taking a back seat to the tariffs.”
Boomtown is both wild and secular
Most of the domestically produced iron in America has come from northern Minnesota since the turn of the 20th century. This transforms a steam shovel backed by Rockefeller and Carnegie money into a muddy sprawl of frontier camp, living like crazy.
That year, the mines attracted thousands of migrants from Finland and Croatia, creating both wild and cosmopolitan boomtown cultures everywhere in between. This is mixed with “more than 30 different foreign tongues Babel crashing and clank of Machinery,” as I wrote in my 1912 report.
Over a century later, the iron range is culturally different from other parts of the state. In towns like Chisholm, onion churches can separate residential neighbours. The Italian restaurant in red sauce lined up at the main drug and bar, holding a dusty bottle of Perinkovak of Vulcan wormwood liqueur on an old-fashioned person's top shelf.
Many go back to the mines, and their family tree is intertwined with the history of corporate integration and labor force, boom, and more often the history of bust.
“They're also a great opportunity to join the government,” said Mayor Pete Hidke, Hibbing, just south of Chisholm, who joined the government after being fired from mining work in the 1980s.
As in the early '80s, less than half of miners are employed in the iron range, covered by cheaper imports and a shift in manufacturing from the US when they fall victim to improved technology and decline in the domestic steel industry.
Today, the fate of this range changes primarily to trade policies, free trade agreements and tariff promotions and pulls. This was revealed in the 2010s when China, where iron production in all other countries grew, began to flood international markets, cutting global prices by 2015 and spurring thousands of layoffs at Minnesota mines. Since then, “The iron range knows that tariffs are important for our domestic production and survival,” said Cal Worwas, a Republican state representative and steel worker at Clinton Township.
The Obama administration ultimately imposed severe anti-dumping tariffs on China, but the episode exacerbated local dissatisfaction with the Democrats. For decades, the fierce cooperative politics of the Iron Rangers has become a massive country reverence for the Democrat Farmer Labour Party, the Minnesota variant of the region. However, in socially conservative regions with good resource extraction, many have found themselves opposed from the DFL on environmental protection and social issues, and more and more convinced that urban and suburban parties are not paying sufficient attention to the economic concerns of the scope.
“They awakened too much for me,” said Cuff, the mayor of Virginia, who left the DFL in 2016 and supported Trump.
Trump loved himself even more by surpassing the region's previous Republican candidates in 2016 and imposing a 25% tariff on Chinese steel during his first term. Today, the local delegation to the state legislature is completely excluded from Republicans for one state senator.
Hope and anxiety about customs
China's tariffs are widely supported by Republicans and Democrats in the iron area. But Trump has pledged a 25% tariff on Canada and similar penalties for cars and auto parts imported into the US are causing warnings.
“I am very supportive of protectionist policies on industries that are important to our national defense,” said Grant Housechild, a state senator in the Third District of Minnesota's Canadian border and a Democrat who remains in the legislative delegation in the Iron Range. “But by chance, all places, everything, all at once on all, on allies and enemies, not the best policy.”
Manufacturing experts say even the domestic industries Trump wants to strengthen relies on complex supply chains that go back and forth with local trading partners that are difficult to solve in places like the Great Lakes region.
This is especially true in the American automotive industry, which relies heavily on robust North American supply chains that frequently include cross-border trade,” says Matteo Fini, an analyst at S&P Global. American-made catalytic converters are shipped to Canada for installation in the engine and then sent back to the US. American lithium becomes cathodes in Canada, assembled into battery packs in the US and sent again north for production of vehicles.
The impact on this system can be felt in the iron range, and Canada's broader tariffs, as well as the mutual tariffs imposed by Canada, will affect the region in other ways. Minnesota utility buys Canadian hydropower. The paper mill runs on Canadian wood pulp. Other mainstays of the local economy, tourism and transport of the Great Lakes, rely on simple border crossings.
The local meaning of the trade war is severe enough, and some Trump supporters on its scope have concluded that despite his years of tariff evangelism, the president's recent threat must be a bluff.
“I think it's a negotiation tactic to try and compromise,” Cuff said. He paused. “I think so.”
But for local Democrats, Trump's hostility towards his northern neighbors has disrupted his frustration with the president.
“All these things about Canada – I mean, where did it come from?” said Mary Beth Pereira, a retired public health nurse at Hibbing. “If you have a brain, you know we're going to pay for it all.”
But others have begun to come to Trump's vision.
“I don't care that they hit Canada,” said Tim Simpson, a retired truck driver at Hibbing.
Simpson left the area for some time in the 1980s after losing his job at a local taconite mine. As a political independence, he voted for Trump in 2016, but not in 2024.
Still, he said that the fiery thing of the president's trade war might be good for the iron range.
“I hope it straightens a lot of things and we'll get a lot of their work back,” he said. “We've lost them since the 60s since childhood.”
