Analysts have begun publishing more detailed projections of the effects President-elect Donald Trump's tariff plans could have on states and businesses, drawing a line between those the plans would prosper and those they would harm.
During his first administration, Trump implemented a series of tariffs against China as part of his ongoing trade war with Beijing, seeking to shrink the gap between U.S. imports and exports. Over the course of his first term in the White House, Trump widened that gap to its highest level since 2008, the Department of Commerce said in a 2021 report.
The trade deficit grew by almost $200 billion between 2016 and 2020, even as Trump managed to bring down the trade deficit with China. The success of Trump's policies against China led President Joe Biden to extend and expand some of them.
In 2024, Trump campaigned on reimplementing his tariffs and adding more, including a universal tariff of at least 10 percent on all imports.
Trump's first administration maintained tariffs based on industries, with up to 50 percent on solar panels, 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum from multiple countries and regions, including India, Canada, Mexico and the European Union, the Peterson Institute for International Economics reported.
An analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center looked at which states would suffer most under the plan—a projected 60 percent tariff on China, in addition to the universal tariff—and found that some Southern and Midwestern states would likely suffer most because of their heavier reliance on imports.
The think tank's review of imports versus exports by state found that in 2023, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi had more than 20 percent imports as a share of their gross domestic product compared to a national average of 11 percent.
South Dakota, at 2 percent, had the lowest level of imports, while Kentucky, at 27 percent, had the highest. The analysis said states with more than 15 percent imports would likely suffer as well, such as New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware and Georgia.
Some analysts have highlighted California's reliance on Chinese and Mexican imports—which accounted for about 40 percent of the state's imports in 2023—as a reason the West Coast giant could be hit hard under the new administration.
The Port of Los Angeles, which handles almost 10 percent of all U.S. imports, found that trade activity rose almost 19 percent between September 2023 and September 2024, Cal Matters reported. The port's trade accounts for almost 1 million jobs in the state.
Phillip Sanfield, a spokesperson for the port, told the outlet, "Significant increases in tariffs, and the possibility of retaliatory tariffs, could have a significant impact on traffic—and jobs—at the port," adding that officials were "monitoring developments closely."
Smaller ports around the state also handle significant amounts of trade, such as the Port of Long Beach, which accounts for about 3 percent of all U.S. imports and more than 500,000 jobs in the state.
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Doug Clinton, the CEO of Intelligent Alpha, told Newsweek that he expected Trump to focus on implementing tariffs on China and that talk of more tariffs were "ultimately a negotiation tool or something that would actually be implemented relative to what we saw in that first term."
Clinton, using a large-language artificial intelligence model, had his team run investment analysis on which companies could perform better under Trump's tariff plan, focusing on companies that might have a strong domestic output but a heavy export focus, such as BMW, or companies that might resist the loss of imports due to high demand, such as the equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, as other companies look to build manufacturing capacity.
"Caterpillar stock is actually down since the election results, partly because they have almost 30 factories in China, where they manufacture parts, and then they bring some of those parts over to the States to power other vehicles, but … there's also this reassuring dynamic where it's likely other companies are going to want to build manufacturing capacity," Clinton said.
He said Apple could also suffer under the tariffs, since it might try to pass the burden onto consumers, and if the iPhone leaned too hard on a new AI that didn't perform at the levels that the company expected, it could hurt sales by having too little to offer for the higher price point. However, if the AI did perform, it might help the company resist tariff shocks.
Clinton warned that many companies were facing more issues than competition in trying to improve their appeal and product quality relative to popular foreign options. He said the companies that would best ride out the tariffs would be the ones that succeeded in "diversifying their supply chain" and closing talent gaps.
"We look at the semiconductor space in particular, which has been a focus, trying to bring some of that manufacturing capacity from Taiwan in particular to America," Clinton said. "Taiwan Semi has done some of that. But still, there's a lot of talent, and there's a lot of—I think, in some ways—a gap between the capabilities that are abroad in China and Taiwan to make certain products and what we have here in the United States."
"We might be able to close that gap over time, but it's not something that's just going to just be a year project," he continued. "I think this is going to be something that can be ongoing for a long time. But I wouldn't expect any sort of tariffs to all of a sudden, next year or the year after that, make it a nonissue."
