It's weird how the Trump tariff apologists keep saying that these efforts will encourage manufacturers to move their production back to the U.S. That seems to assume that the U.S. is the only, or the most important, market for multinational companies. In the current world, it is not.
Most of the world still has relatively low trade barriers. Imagine you are a multinational company in a world with mostly low tariffs to trade, where most of the world's consumers live, and then this one economy with high trade barriers that has a minority of consumers. Where would you put your manufacturing? In that one surrounded by tariff economy, or in the (relatively) free trade zone that is the rest of the world where most potential customers live? It really seems like Trump's wall of tariffs around the U.S. will encourage much of the world economy to write off the U.S., not move their manufacturing there.
For example, think about a company like Apple which makes its iPhones with components and steps that take place across several countries. With Trump's tariffs, Apple how has two choices: it could try to build a copy of its entire world-spanning supply chain in the U.S. But that would cost a lot of money, some of the components of an iPhone (rare earths, lithium) may not be abundant enough to supply domestically in the U.S., Even if they managed to pull off an all-American supply chain that would only be a benefit for the iPhones it sells in the U.S. Most iPhone users are not in the U.S.
The company's second choice is to keep all or almost all of its existing supply chain (Apple claims that the final packaging step for its products takes place in Cupertino, CA, but that one step could be easily and cheaply moved elsewhere), and to continue to sell its products to the 96% of the world's population that is not in the United States. Even when you only talk about the wealthier parts of the world: Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, much of China, South Korea, parts of the Middle East etc., there are currently a lot more high-end consumers outside the U.S. than inside it. In any choice between the U.S. consumer and all the other consumers combined in the rest of the world, the rest of the world is where most of the money is these days.
