Mike Musheinesh gets about 75 percent of the auto parts his company sells from China. But even with plenty to lose in a trade war, Mr. Musheinesh gave President Trump the benefit of the doubt when he started increasing tariffs on the company’s most important trading partner.
The president “needs to shake it up, and I’m actually paying for the shake-up,” Mr. Musheinesh said in mid-April. “But at the end,” he added, “I think it’s going to be much better off.”
These days, he is less certain. The U.S.-China trade deal he thought would have materialized by now remains elusive. To blunt the effects of the tariffs, Mr. Musheinesh has started selling directly to consumers in Mexico and has entered into a deal with a factory in Turkey. But only so much can be done.
“Actually, I am panicking now,” Mr. Musheinesh said last week after paying a 145 percent tariff on a container of new products that had arrived in Detroit from China. He said “being able to pay for this negotiation is about to run out on my end.” He added, “It’s gone long enough.”
Mr. Musheinesh, the chief executive of Detroit Axle, sells replacement brake rotors, steering gears and countless other car parts to mechanics and do-it-yourselfers across the United States.
Shortly after the tariffs were announced, he said it looked like Mr. Trump was using some of the same negotiating tactics with China that Detroit Axle might use to get a better deal with a vendor. Mr. Musheinesh described the strategy a few weeks ago as a “lot of pump fake,” a way to get the other side’s attention and force a compromise.
But no compromise has come, and Mr. Musheinesh worries about the consequences for his business and for the country, with fewer cargo ships arriving in American ports and possible supply shortages looming. “Is it a trade war?” he asked. “Is it an embargo now? Is it morphing into something else?”
“We’re running into a crisis right now,” said Mr. Musheinesh, whose company has around 400 employees in the United States, plus hundreds more in China, Jordan and Mexico. “It’s going to be a big crisis, and something needs to be done about it” and “we’re not going to be able to import in time to meet the shortages.”
‘We Made It’
Detroit Axle started in 1990 as a small shop that assembled replacement CV joints, which connect a car’s transmission to its wheels, and sold them to mechanics in Detroit.
Mr. Musheinesh’s father, Ed, a Palestinian refugee from Syria, founded the company a few years after arriving in the United States. Mike, who was 7 when he came to Michigan, said he enrolled in public schools, learned English and, about six years later, became an American citizen. He eventually settled in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb where Ford is headquartered and where a majority of residents have Arab heritage.
“Where was I — a son of refugees languishing under the Assad regime — what was my future or destiny going to be?” Mr. Musheinesh said. “We made it to the greatest country on Earth.”
In its early days, the family business, then known as Dearborn Axle, had only a few employees. Over time, the company grew, adding more clients and more parts to its inventory. After dropping out of high school, Mr. Musheinesh joined the company, which remained a small, locally focused operation until the mid 2000s, when Detroit Axle turned to eBay and Amazon to open up a national marketplace and sell directly to consumers.
Soon, instead of assembling much of what it sold in Michigan, the company was placing ever-larger orders to Chinese factories with advanced equipment and specialized production lines. The business grew quickly, and Detroit Axle came to stock thousands of individual parts — brake calipers for your 1997 Chevy Blazer, wheel bearings for your 2009 Ford Taurus, CV axles for your 2013 Toyota Camry — that it sold to auto-body shops and car owners looking to save money by doing repairs themselves.
When Mr. Trump’s first term started, Detroit Axle had opened a towering warehouse in suburban Ferndale, just across Eight Mile Road from Detroit. There, many workers tracked down parts and boxed them up for customers in Milwaukee or San Diego or Dawsonville, Ga.
By that point, Detroit Axle was not assembling any of its products in the United States.
‘A Byproduct of the Tariffs’
A newly acquired factory in Warren, Mich., another Detroit suburb, is hidden behind a railroad track in a building with no sign. For the last few months, around 150 Detroit Axle workers have been inside stripping, cleaning and reassembling old car parts from materials salvaged from junkyards. A new hire, Mr. Musheinesh said, could expect to make between $20 and $25 an hour.
Until last year, that work had been done mostly in Mexico. And before that, all those parts had been made new in China. When Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on China during his first term — a decision that made Mr. Musheinesh furious — it prompted Detroit Axle to bring some manufacturing work back to North America.
“Really, all these employees are just a byproduct of the tariffs,” Mr. Musheinesh said last month as he walked through the factory, where workers were adding new components to refurbished Ford Focus brake calipers. “Because it would have been just easier just to buy it from China.”
Mr. Trump has long voiced concern about the United States’ trade deficit with China, and has argued that steep tariffs are essential to end America’s declining share of global manufacturing. He has called on companies to produce more goods in the United States. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that negotiations with China over tariffs had not begun, though officials from the two countries are expected to speak about trade issues later this week in Switzerland.
Mr. Musheinesh said he had been leaning toward supporting Kamala Harris in the run-up to last year’s election, but ultimately decided not to vote for a presidential candidate. He described his political beliefs as a mix of both parties’ values, and said he usually did not vote.
He said he would like his company to make more products in the United States. But it is not quite as simple as deciding to switch brake rotor production from China to Chicago. In many cases, he has found, there is neither the infrastructure nor the expertise to build in the United States what he buys overseas.
“I wholeheartedly agree with the idea and the philosophy of bringing back and building it here,” Mr. Musheinesh said. “I’m 100 percent behind the president and I know a shake-up needs to be done.”
But he said there needed to be a resolution. “I hope it comes sooner rather than later, that’s what I pray for.”
If the tariffs remain for the long term, he foresees a series of unappealing choices: Accept a blow to his profit margin? Raise prices for customers? Try to negotiate a better deal with shippers? All of the above?
Some Chinese companies, he said, are now building new factories in other parts of Asia and in Egypt to try to circumvent the tariffs.
But Mr. Musheinesh envisions his own potential solution. He suggested that the Trump administration work with Chinese companies to build new factories in this country.
Mr. Musheinesh believes that would allow both the United States and China to claim a win, though it might be a hard sell in this geopolitical moment. After all, some Chinese investments in the United States have been seen as national security threats.
Still, Mr. Musheinesh said Chinese companies have the skills and equipment to build the parts, and could bring supervisors from Asia to oversee the work. If they hired Americans to do the building, that would mean solid manufacturing jobs and more American-made parts. And for businessmen like him, tariffs would no longer be a problem.
“Why couldn’t the destination of these Chinese factories be the U.S.?” he asked. “What is the hurdle? How could we roll out the red carpet?”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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