| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. This past week marked President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office for his second term. In today’s newsletter, Shawn Donnan writes about the wheelbarrow factory where he marked the occasion in his first term, and what it tells us about American manufacturing today. You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. When Donald Trump set out to mark the 100th day of his first term in 2017, he headed for a wheelbarrow factory in a swing state with a rich history and patriotic bona fides. The Ames True Temper plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had almost 150 years of production behind it, and the company’s toolmaking history went back even further, to 1774. Ames Cos. supplied shovels to George Washington’s Revolutionary Army and the carvers of Mount Rushmore. Its wheelbarrows helped build the Hoover Dam. For Trump it was a perfect backdrop to launch his plans to bring factory jobs back to America. “We believe in ‘Made in the USA,’ and it’s coming back stronger and better and faster than even I thought,” Trump told reporters that day as he sat at a desk set up on the factory floor. With cabinet members and Ames staff lined up behind him, he signed two executive orders that set in motion the process that less than a year later led to his first tariffs.  Trump signs an executive order in 2017. Photographer: Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo Eight years on, Trump marked the first 100 days of his second term on April 29 while overseeing a supercharged version of his tariff-led plan to bring manufacturing back to the US. The plan has rattled financial markets and sparked recession fears. As for the Ames True Temper plant, it doesn’t exist anymore. In 2023 its private equity owner, Griffon Corp., shut down the plant, which once made 85% of the wheelbarrows sold in the US, and shifted the work overseas. It’s part of what the company, on earnings calls, described as a “global sourcing” strategy that wiped out two Ames-owned Pennsylvania factories and more than 250 jobs. Go to your local Home Depot, and the True Temper wheelbarrows are now clearly labeled “Made in China.” Griffon didn’t respond to requests for comment. Wheelbarrows are one tiny part of the $30 trillion US economy, but the Ames True Temper plant in Harrisburg now sits as a forlorn example of the unforgiving economics that plague American manufacturers—a calculus that for many businesses has only gotten worse since Trump’s latest tariffs. The notion that the US should have the capacity to produce critical goods, whether semiconductors or steel, is one that attracts broad support, even in a politically divided country. Where consensus is lacking is on how to go about it. Trump may one day be proved right about what he’s pitching as the magical power of tariffs to bring jobs back to America. History and economics aren’t on his side, though, and the list of barriers the president faces as he tries to bully (or occasionally cajole) manufacturers into expanding production at home is growing, a result in no small part of his policies. Tariffs only add to the operational challenges businesses already face, including labor shortages, a deficient power grid and red tape. Speak to managers, and the picture that emerges quickly is that Trump’s tariffs—and the whiplash-inducing trade policies of his first 100 days—are making things more difficult. Companies ranging from giants such as Ford, Ingersoll Rand and Tesla to mom-and-pop outfits have filed more than 1,100 requests to be excluded from the duties of 145% or more that are now in place on Chinese machinery they want to import to set up or expand US factories. “To be very blunt about it, I think manufacturers are very concerned” about tariffs, Jay Timmons, president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Manufacturers, said in an April 17 interview on Bloomberg Radio. Keep reading: Made-in-USA Wheelbarrows Promoted by Trump Are Now Made in China | 
