Trump's tariffs are already burdening this used car business in Oklahoma

Antonio Austin discovered the car from 100 meters away – red dirt that was racked into tinted windows, the front bumper disappeared, smoked under the bonnet. “Damn, I hate this car,” he said. He had sold the 2012 Dodge Avenger almost a year earlier for a down payment of $ 1,000, but recently he recently appeared with his used car dealer with problems that became more complicated and more expensive.

He grabbed a service inlay from his desk, grabbed the lip with chewing tobacco and went outside into the stiff prairie -wind southern Oklahoma. The last few weeks have been among the most difficult of his 25-year career, whereby his inventory fell near an all-time low and his turnover was even lower. He watched the avenger knocked over the barren parking lot and thought in front of the garage for the service. The driver climbed and hit the door with his fist.

“Can you believe that?” Schneider said Phillips, 28th “It died again.”

“It couldn't be anything,” said Antonio when he raised the hood.

“How should I go to work?” she said. “Who will pick up my son in day care in an hour?”

“Maybe it's not as bad as it seems,” he said. “Let's try not to panic yet.”

He had given himself the same advice every day for the last month when the earliest effects of the auto tariffs from President Trump from New Dealers to used cars to foreign parts came. Now the consequences ended up the most difficult at the end of the American automotive industry in places such as Antonios purchase here in Lawton, Okla. The 46 -year -old Antonio mainly sold to customers with poor loans and few savings -people who could not afford to worry about that Antonios cars were often more than a decade old and were composed of second -hand parts. “My sales discussion is to bring it from point A to point B,” he said.

Most of his customers paid their loans in two weekly rates and provided him with cash envelopes to avoid the credit card fee of $ 5. Almost half of them were back in their payments, and Antonio hardly stopped with his own operating costs. Trump had told people that they should be “patient” and “some pain” before his tariffs would promote American production and improve wages for the working class, but Antonio and his customers were already at a break. It was a business without a lead for people without options – and now the cars were up to 25 percent more expensive to buy, renovate and repair.