OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — America’s only rare earths mine heard from anxious companies soon after China responded to President Donald Trump’s tariffs this month by limiting exports of those minerals used for military applications and in many high-tech devices.

“Based on the number of phone calls we’re receiving, the effects have been immediate,” said Matt Sloustcher, a spokesperson for MP Materials, the company that runs the Mountain Pass mine in California’s Mojave Desert.

The trade war between the world’s two biggest economies could lead to a critical shortage of rare earth elements if China maintains its export controls long-term or expands them to seek an advantage in any trade negotiations. The California mine can’t meet all of the U.S. demand for rare earths, which is why Trump is trying to clear the way for new mines.

Rare earth elements are important ingredients in electric vehicles, powerful magnets, advanced fighter jets, submarines, smartphones, television screens and many other products. Despite their name, the 17 elements aren’t actually rare, but it’s hard to find them in a high enough concentration to make a mine worth the investment.

Tariffs will impact ore supply and costsMP Materials, which acquired the idle Mountain Pass site in 2017, said Thursday it would stop sending its ore to China for processing because of the export restrictions and 125% tariffs on U.S. imports China imposed. The company said it would continue processing nearly half of what it mines on site and store the rest while it works to expand its processing capability.

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DONALD TRUMP: “My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. We’ve been waiting for a long time. April 2, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.”

JESSE WATTERS: Today, Donald Trump fundamentally changed the country as we know it. This is the biggest shift in economic policy since World War II when we liberated Europe and Asia. 47 says we are now liberating ourselves from globalization.

DONALD TRUMP: “Our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. American steelworkers, autoworkers, farmers, and skilled craftsmen—we have a lot of them here with us today—they are really suffering gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream. This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history. It’s our declaration of economic independence.”

JESSE WATTERS: After we saved Europe from Hitler and Asia from the emperor, we created a free-trade system to help the Allies’ economies recover, and they would help us contain communism. Life was great for American families—wives did not have to work if they didn’t want to, you could own a nice home and have a big family and afford college on a decent salary, and your kids could have a better life than you. The United States finally won the Cold War, gave birth to globalization, and then other countries—even our allies—took advantage of us, took advantage of a system we designed to save and protect them.

China, a country we basically created, became an absolute menace, and American multinationals conspired to shift jobs and factories overseas and decimated the middle class. If you are one of those workers the last 40 years, free trade basically destroyed your life. Look at this chart—the top 50% of income earners, especially the top 10 percent, accumulated a massive amount of wealth, but the other half of the country, the bottom 50% of earners, have been suffocating at the bottom. The American dream has been dying, and politicians said there is nothing they can do about it.

BARACK OBAMA: “Some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back. That he’s going to bring all of these jobs back—how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says I’m going to negotiate a better deal—how? How exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually, the answer is he doesn’t have an answer. But they are going to have to retrain for the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past.”

JESSE WATTERS: Mr. Hope and Change is like, “Sorry, I’m one of the most powerful men in the world, but there’s nothing I can do.” Washington has done nothing for 40 years except open the borders, let industry leave, and spend, spend, spend. Could it be that there was a magic wand this whole time? Obama just didn’t know how to use it?

DONALD TRUMP: “So he said, ‘What can we do?’ So easy—I drop a 25% tax on China, and, you know, I said to somebody that it’s really the messenger—the messenger is important. I could have one man say, ‘We are going to tax you 25%,’ and I could say another, ‘Listen, you [bleep], I’m going to tax you 25%.’”

JESSE WATTERS: Trump has been talking about winning trade wars since the ‘90s. He raised tariffs in his first term, and we had the highest wage growth in 50 years—a manufacturing renaissance, a hot stock market, oh, and no inflation. This term, he’s going even bigger.

DONALD TRUMP: “China, 67 percent—that’s tariffs charged to the USA, including currency manipulation and trade barriers… We are going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%. We charge them less—so how can anybody be upset? They will be because we’ve never charged anybody anything, but now we are going to charge… European Union—they are very tough traders—39 percent, we are going to charge them 20%. I don’t blame the people for doing it—I think they are very smart. I blame the people that sat right in that Oval Office.”

JESSE WATTERS: If you care about the forgotten men and women of this country, about restoring the American dream, Trump says you have to be all in on the trade war. But since he’s the general of the war, Democrats who claim they represent workers are against it.

CHUCK SCHUMER: “Donald Trump is preparing to take a sledgehammer to the American economy by preparing a tsunami of tariffs on all sorts of goods Americans purchase every day. A tsunami of tariffs—let’s be clear, Donald Trump’s tariffs are a tax hike on American families.”

JESSE WATTERS: Wall Street money put Schumer in the Senate, so he’s just a puppet. They drove up prices to forty-year highs, he’s been raising taxes for decades. The man who was complacent in hijacking 100,000 American factories and losing 5 million jobs overseas can shut up, with all due respect. He destroyed American industry—that’s why we call it the Rust Belt, it’s why Trump was elected twice—to stop Schumer’s gang from carving the country up.

The media says Americans cannot afford tariffs—we cannot afford not to have tariffs. We created a monster in China—they dump cheap products here, they steal our secrets, they poison us with drugs, and they killed 1 million Americans with a virus. Trade policy should align with foreign policy. The pandemic proved this country isn’t even self-sufficient—we have to start making our medicine here, and if we want to build ships and icebreakers, they have to be built with American steel, not cheap subsidized steel dumped here from China.

If we are going to win the AI arms race, we can’t rely on Taiwan for semiconductors—we have to make the chips here. If we don’t protect our economy, we can’t protect our national security, and we can’t protect American lives.

DONALD TRUMP: “The United States can no longer produce enough antibiotics to treat our sick. We import virtually all of our computers, phones, televisions, and electronics—we used to dominate the field, and now we import it all from different countries. A single shipyard in China produces more ships—chips—every year than all of the American shipyards combined. Think of that—it was a business we used to dominate, we used to dominate it totally. Chronic trade deficits are no longer merely an economic problem—they are a national emergency.”

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